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.