I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one of the main goals of Maneno is to have a lightweight download footprint. We been making good strides in keeping the site small to download, yet fully functional. Of course, this might not be enough for some folks who are having to make do with extremely narrow internet connections and high latency. It would seem to be a simple thing to just get rid of all the images on the site or take away functionality to make it lighter to download. But, not everyone has the same needs when it comes to a light bandwidth site.
Because of this, we have introduced a connection speed selector. You can choose your speed when you join or modify it through your profile page. This a very new feature and it will evolve over time to best fit peoples' needs, but currently there are four settings:
1 Fast (>256kb) - All of the site functions are available.
2 A Little Slow (128kb-256kb) - This blocks a couple of minor scripts and some other items. There are no visible changes, but the download size is a bit less.
3 Slow (56kb-128kb) - This takes out a great deal more in addition to #2. You won't see the individual blog themes. Images on the home page are taken out. Site graphics are removed. Articles will only have a small, thumbnail image. The WSIWYG editor for writing articles is removed as well.
4 Very Slow (<56kb) - This is quite extreme. In addition to everything from #2 and #3, you won't see any article images (unless a user embedded them in the text). In time, more components will be reduced to have Maneno still be functional, but be quite plain and work almost completely as text-only with a target page size of around 5kb.
All of these settings are available now, although #4 isn't complete yet. Play around with them and see what you think. Like I said, we're still working on it and will be refining it, but soon, it will hopefully allow access from even the smallest trickle to this platform of an internet connection. As always, send us a line through the Contact page if you have any feedback.
In constantly striving to create a more accessible platform, we at Maneno are always on the lookout for new languages to make the site available in because let's face it, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish versions are great, but we feel that the true strength of the site will be having the native languages of Africa available as well. Because of that, there is the Swahili version and soon (hopefully very soon) we will have a version in Bambara. In case you haven't heard of this language, let me assure you that this is not an April Fool's. This is a West African language that is spoken by around 2-3 million people. Naturally, it doesn't have a strong online presence, but we're hoping that this can change in the future because of efforts like this. I mean, if Slovenian, which is spoken by 2.4 million people can have a Wikipedia with over 100,000 entries, why not Bambara?
When it comes to integrating African languages in a website, one such as Swahili is overall, rather easy to implement. It uses a strictly English, Latin alphabet for the base of its characters. Bambara however gets considerably more complex. There are a number of characters which are in addition to the Latin base such as ɛ, ɔ, and ɲ (or ŋ depending on the dialect.) Typing these characters is a problem because there is no native support in Windows or the Mac OS.
By way of my pain, I would just like to point people to Sil, a group which has created a keyboard for Bambara and other languages, albeit a keyboard that is only for Windows machines. That takes care of the typing. There is still the issue of the displaying. For that, you need to encode your pages as UTF-8 which amazingly, actually supports these characters, although possibly not in every font for the web, so your kilometerage may vary. There is also the issue that any translation file needs to be created, from the start as a Unicode file. Regular files will just end up mashing up the extended characters.
That is a quick overview of the problems. I hope that it helps others who might be trying to do something similar with Bambara or other languages on the web. Obviously, once we launch this version of the site, you can be sure that we'll let everyone know about it as we think it will be pretty darned cool to have!
After the wonderful writeup about Maneno by our friend Ndesanjo Macha at Global Voices Online, we were contacted by Jamillah Knowles to participate in her radio show Pods and Blogs on BBC's Five Live. We knew Pods and Blogs quite well since our colleagues at Global Voices had participated in it on a couple of occasions, and we had listened to the podcasts of the show which are available at their website a number of times. So we immediately said yes, and only a couple of days later we were recording our segment via Skype. And here it is.
Pods and Blogs is an hour weekly radio show dedicated to covering the news as it's seen by bloggers, podcasters and the citizen media. On the website they say that it's a radio experiment that attemps:
to report the news members of the public are creating, discussing and sharing across the world thanks to the internet.
After a writeup at White African, who is one of our most favorite blogs, we have recently received some more love from other blogs we are big fans of. Here's a second little roundup of our star appearances in the blogosphere:
This is another blog that we're subscribed to, as it focuses on humanitarian news with a special focus on technology. The author is Jon Thompson, who has worked for Doctors without Borders and International Medical Corps in a bunch of countries in Africa and elsewhere. A couple of weeks ago he wrote a post about a great tool for browsing the web in low bandwidth environments called Loband, and of course we had to leave a note. On the comments thread, one of the guys behind Loband to responded the following:
We’ve been thinking there was a need for something like that for a while [...] We came up with a target page size of 25KB using estimates of the bandwidth you get on the desktop in African universities.The 50KB typical page size of Maneno is fantastic, especially when you consider the average web page size is now over 300KB (which would have a 2 minute download time on a 20Kb/s connection).
So a few days later Aid Worker Daily devoted a post to Maneno, in which he gave some more positive feedback:
It looks like a great product and it seems like a perfect tool for that mass of aid workers that start blogs primarily to keep their friends back home updated and to let their families know that they are still alive. It has very low bandwidth demands and offers a clean and simple interface. Please check it out and let us know what you think [...]
We'd love to hear it too!
Global Voices doesn't need a presentation: it's the best blog about blogs around the world. We love it and we've been involved with it as authors for quite some time. So we were very excited when we saw that Ndesanjo Macha, the Sub-Saharan Africa editor for the site, had decided to write about us collecting what several other bloggers had written - including Aid Worker Daily and White African. Since one of the key efforts of Global Voices is translating blogs from around the world to bring them to a global audience, the multilingual nature of Maneno was appreciated:
Considering the multilingual nature of the region, Maneno was built to allow for multiple language versions of articles to “sit atop one another for immediate access.” The interface of the platform is also translated into different languages to remove linguistic barriers.
TechSoup is a well-known and respected technology resource that offers a variety of information and services for nonprofits, so we were more than thrilled when they mentioned the Global Voices article on their blog:
While internet connections in the developed world are no longer charged per megabyte or tiered, this is often not the case in Africa, not to mention basic accessibility in more rural areas. A mobile accessible version is forthcoming as well. I often question ventures that seem like "reinventing the wheel," but a user-centric system that increases the availability of information to more users may be welcomed — and necessary — in this case.
We've just recently renewed our About section to be a lot more helpful. Instead of the one line summary of what Maneno is trying to do, we've broken down the core elements of what we're working on here. This is so people can see why we're not just another blogging platform, but a new approach to age-old problems which have never really been solved by other systems.
We've also moved our Spread the Words section in to About as it seemed like a more proper place for it. Other Projects are some of the smaller things we're working on, which are either augmented by or provided support to Maneno. And of course if you want to know a bit more about the people behind Maneno, there is a full Board of Directors section. We are a non-profit by the way. That was never really fully talked about as much as it should have.
By far and away, the most important section in all of this is Support Maneno. There are a number of items in there which lay out all the ways that people can help support our cause to get more African voices on the web. A number of these aren't even Maneno specific, such as starting a BarCamp in your area, which can go a long way to promote all of the issues like African linguistics and connectivity to people that you know.
Anyways, just a bit more transparency to the project. We hope people find it useful. Oh, translations for the entire About to our other languages are coming shortly.
Well, actually, we're not in anything of yours, but more the fact that for every internet browser out there, when you visit a site, it sends out a little bit of data saying something to the effect of, "Hi there, I'm a browser and my user prefers to see articles in these languages: boom, boom, boom..." So, say you have the French version of Firefox, then it will tell whatever site it visits to say that a French version is preferred. But, you're not stuck with this. Every modern browser allows the user the ability to change their language preferences in the settings of the browser. This is useful if you happen to speak multiple languages and want to see if there are other versions available.
But, naturally I digress as most people won't muck about with these settings, since they'll have already installed a browser in their main language. It happens that a lot of websites out there don't take too much advantage of this though as most of them as mono-lingual. Google is one example of a website that does indeed use this to try and see what version of their site to serve you based upon your language preferences.
While Maneno is obviously not Google, at the same time, we've got five different language versions of this site and we realized that we need to make their access even easier. So now, if you have say, the Swahili version of Firefox and you come to Maneno, you'll see the Swahili version of the site. If you have a Spanish, Basque, Catalan, Gallego, or one of the countless versions based upon Spanish dialects in Central and South America, you will see the Spanish version. Same thing for French as well as Portuguese. If you don't have any of these languages, then the site will default to English.
Ah, but what if you're a Catalan or Mexican Spanish speaker and you'd just rather see the English version? Simple. Click on one of the language links at the top of any and every page to switch to that language version. But what happens the next time you come to the site? Well, this is the other little thing we've taken care of in that when you click on one of those links, the site hands your browser a cookie, which Maneno takes as gospel above all else when it comes to determining which language to show you. It will indefinitely remember this preference.
While these items have been on the books to 'embetter' for awhile, it was the Social Media for Social Change blogging that showed us there was some language confusion for people when they first joined. In one instance, a native French speaker wrote a French article, tagged as English and then wrote an English article tagged as French for a translation. A lot of this stemmed from their coming to the site and seeing the English version first and while this was a single case, we knew we could make things easier to use and take full advantage of the multi-localizations we're building in to this site from the start.
One of the main pillars of Maneno is to have a small download footprint due to the fact that the target group of users will either be on a) slow land connections of b) slow mobile connections. Obviously, both of these points will change over time (with point b being the most likely one to improve, which is why a mobile version of Maneno is in the works), but for now, we've got to work with what we've got.
While always designing the site with this factor in mind, we've just leveraged a bit of the inherent technologies available in code to make the site even smaller. What we're doing is compressing the site. This takes all of the text that's coming to your browser and mashes it down in to a machine-readable format which is then unmashed when you open up the page.
The net result of this is that all the pages are at least half the size that they were previously. The home page is quite below 50kb as well as the main page in the admin where you write your articles. While this should provide even faster access to the site, it has two potential downfalls. One is that there may be browser incompatibility issues. While we've tested this thoroughly on everything that we can think of, there is still the off chance that someone out there could have problems. Obviously, we'd love to know if that's the case. The second issue is that this taxes the server more. Because there is the "mashing" work to do, every page on the site takes just that much more horsepower to create. This just means that we'll have to monitor the site and see what comes about and adjust things as they happen. All part of the whole Beta process.
While the holidays have been going on, we took a chance to sit back and look over what we've built with Maneno. As is often the case when you're rapidly prototyping and building out a brand new system, you're often more worried about getting it working for user rather than getting it working the best that it can for the user. This was the situation with entering and editing articles on the site.
As was cited in Erik Hersman's email interview with me, this site was originally built on components for a blogging system that I had created for use while traveling. It was designed to be extremely lightweight and simple for slow internet connections and dangerously out of date web browsers wherever I got web access. This worked quite well for Maneno's purposes when we set down this part, but then there were the functions such as: localization, multi-author blogs, GMT orientation, and country categorizing to deal with.
When everything got tossed together, a bit of the user experience was lost in the process. I was not happy with this and so, we all sat down, looked over what we had and thought up ways that it could be made better. The end result is a much more streamlined, focused, and intuitive interface for writing and editing articles on the site. The system now takes in to account all the items that needs to be there and orders them in a manner which seems to make the most sense based on how a user would approach the site.
I'm feeling quite good about it and I hope that folks will take a chance to write a bit and see what they think of it (of course, you have to join to get at these pages.) In the process, we managed to shave a few extra kilobytes off the download footprint, which is always good. And most importantly, there is now room for future features that we're currently working on, which will make that 'task panel' in the admin quickly become a very useful friend to authors on the site.
Hello there everyone, glad to see you're with us at the start of 2009. For us, 2008 was a great year what with starting up the site and getting the basics all fired up. We're very happy to have the bloggers that we have so far and we're looking to add more in the near future, exposing African voices that were previously unheard.
Obviously, the next year is going to hold a lot of changes for Maneno as you can see there is still that Beta bubble in the upper left which will need to be removed once we're feeling solid that the site is out of the initial development phase. Getting to that point is going to mean that in the next 2-3 months, we're going to be rolling out a number of changes we've been working on. One is that the translation system is going to get an overhaul. While it (along with most all the functions) will remain the same in essence, it's going to be made more user friendly. Since we're one of the few sites approaching translation in this manner, it means that there will be a lot of trial and error, feedback and rebuilding before we get a system that we know is the best.
Also on the list are smaller things like cleaning up Themes to be a bit more involved, deeper, and plentiful. Along with this, we're going to set it up so that people who are more technically inclined can upload their own 'CSS' file to fully customize the look of their blog above and beyond what we provide. We know how important having ones own signature is on the web.
Once we get all of these items and a few more minor ones taken care of, we're going to move on to the "big tomato" elements of the site which will involve the mobile aspect. For the second half of the year, we're going to really focus on having a system that will allow people to blog from their mobile phones. We'll have a mobile version of the site available for those on smartphones, but more importantly, we're planning to have a mechanism for people to blog via SMS and eventually MMS. This will allow the site's focus on being a platform for Sub-Saharan Africa come to light. We're very aware that while localization, a lightweight system, and a focus on Africa are great, it's the ability to submit data in a non-internet based form that is crucial. In case you were wondering, we're looking in to the system that Ken Banks and team developed for Frontline SMS. Ushahidi has made great use of it in their notification system and we're looking to have similar success, but in the much different format that is Maneno.
That's a quick rundown of the year ahead. We'll have other items to announce in the coming weeks, so as always, stay tuned!
When we initially launched this site, it was on a less than stellar hosting system. In addition to being pretty slow, it would often crash, and it would do this in the middle of the night for us, which was the middle of the working day for everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa. Not good. Not good at all.
So, we've upgraded to a faster, more reliable system. So far, they've been pretty good. The move has been relatively pain free as these things go. For me, the site seems to run immensely faster, but I'll let everyone else be the judge of that. Hopefully we'll be nice and stable as we keep getting more members with more articles being written. Down the road, we'll probably need to do another upgrade, but for now, I think we're in a good spot.
As always, let us know if anything goes berserk on you while using the site in what would seem to be a normal fashion.
