Sneak preview of Wizzley 2012?

Hey guys,

for thoses of you interested in how Wizzley is *very* soon going to look like: you may now take a look on Pagewizz.com :) It's in German and looks preeeetty different ... 

Ok, Chef just sent me to bed ... gotta go!

It's going to be brilliant!  Congratulations and thank you for all of your hard work. <3

Goodnight, sweet dreams.

Edit:  I have questions!

1,  Is 'Editor's Choice' the same in German as in English? 

2,  Why didn't the English language get one of those posh B letters?  It looks really groovy.  (Referring to the one at the end of HeiB.)   I feel cheated not having one in our alphabet too.

Edit 2:  How is everyone preparing for this?  I'm looking at my articles and checking the thumbnail images.  It looks like Wizzley 2012 is going to be much more image based.  Those thumbnails are going to have to stand out and look enticing.   

At least that's how I view it.

That looks extremely good! Perfect I must say. Btw Jo, you should always try to get a good pic for the top position (and since I've read most of your articles I doubt you need to worry). I always try to get perfect images as it's the first thing people see no matter how they find my article.

Hehe, "ß" more or less stands for two "s" in a row: "ss". As a programmer, I'm rather allergic to such characters, since they often mean some extra work with encoding and escaping ... I love English for its pure ascii based language :-D

Editor's Choice is exactly the same in German - we could translate it, but it then sounds sooo boring.

I guess concerning thumbnails, you don't really need to care too much right now. One glance at your new profile page will show which articles might profit from some new image. However, making sure, each article has an intro of around 100 words (or more) is certainly a good idea, since the top ad will adjust to the length of this text - in most cases resulting in a higher revenue.

Cheers :)

each article has an intro of around 100 words (or more) is certainly a good idea, since the top ad will adjust to the length of this text - in most cases resulting in a higher revenue.

Cheers :)

If I'm not mistaken I read that it needs to be 500 characters (With or without spaces - that I'm not sure). 

Just curious- You say you're a programmer and the ss (Beta symbol) makes it hard? Why does it matter in programming? Can't you program it in English Or the languages (Programming languages)?

After a quick shufty it looks appealing to the eye. However, without having a published Wizz on Pagewizz I cannot really determine the differences we will see when producing them, so my comments are of little value at present.

Jo ß is a combination of our middle / late English long / sharp 's' + another 's' or 'z'. I'm sure you have seen the long / sharp 's': it's the one that looks like an 'f' without the '-' bit in older texts. German is the only language with this letter, and not all German speaking countries use it either. It is called an 'eszett' (s-z) or 'scharfes S' (sharp S).

There is no reason why you could not introduce it into your Wizzes. Just replace any occurrences of 'ss' and you would make your Wizzes immediately branded as your own.

You could also utilize / reintroduce 'Œ' (oe of Latin [& French]) and 'Æ' (ae of Latin), as in archæology (of British English - don't think US English ever did spell it that way). 

Wouldn't your Wizzes look groovy with all those included.

And by the way, English does have all those letters in borrowed words (just as we have accented letters in words borrowed from French, German etc.), but much of the time they have been split to their component letters due to lack of need for the special characters in printing blocks etc. We (the English) always did make words our own by thieving them and melting them down to our own needs and proclivities.

As for what I'm doing in anticipation of the changes: absolutely nothing. I'm gonna wait until the changes have been implemented and then decide.

Definitions:

gonna - going to
shufty - a quick look, a fleeting glance
groovy - 60's popularized (but I think originating from Jazz age US) pop-culture / hippy word [in this case] for 'full of delightfulneß', 'having uniqueneß'

lobobrandon: 19. Jul 2012, 02:22

Just curious- You say you're a programmer and the ss (Beta symbol) makes it hard? Why does it matter in programming? Can't you program it in English Or the languages (Programming languages)?

Example:

Try finding and typing 'Œ', 'ß', 'Æ', any accented Roman character / letter or for that matter any letter from an alphabet that is not specifically catered for on your keyboard.

In programming it is a very similar task - and thus time consuming, if not exceptionally difficult. You have to find the ASCII character nomenclature - in the case of  'ß' = U+00DF (Unicode), but could be U+017F, U+0073, or U+007A [if you want the old-style glyph].

In codepoints.net it states:

"The glyph is not a composition. It has a Ambiguous East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. ........ In text U+00DF behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Lower for sentence and ALetter for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break property is Any."

note the many items of format that must be taken account of when using it: ambiguous east asian width; bidirectional; not mirrored; ALetter; grapheme cluster break any. Fortunately in the case of  'ß' these are mostly similar to those of other Roman characters.

One must also be aware as to whether the character is available in less common font types.

Just a few points to consider.

Thanks humagaia, this is way over my knowledge of ASCII. Didn't know that you could get those kind of combinations. 

As a former programmer / designer / software architect that undertook a lot of localization / globalization of software products I am aware of many of the difficulties that one can encounter when transferring from (or creating) a non-English environment.

You wanna try doing it for Arabic, Hebrew or for that matter Chinese, Japanese or Korean. I'm sure Simon is thankful that there are few differences in the characters used in German [and French], as opposed to English, or the reading direction for that matter.

BTW I still have to deal with some of these problems in my multilingual website: GoogleHowTo.info

Oh wow! Nothing more to say. But, I visited your website a few hours back and saw the many languages you offer.

Looks qood to me:)

Two  questions (one being *very* long):

1. How soon is *very* soon? It says 2012 in title, but half of year is already over?

2. How much flexibility does an author have on his profile? I don't see any links coming from profile except on wizzography. Now we can promote our external site, blog etc. what comes handy if somebody wants to know more about the author. Is there possibility to have more wizzographies in one profile? Does author have more power to choose what to show on first page? Right now only newest articles are shown, but sometimes I would like to include at least one of elder ones...

It looks wonderful Save yourself some work and teach us German.

I know a few words :)

Dhanka = Thank you

Bitter = welcome

Morgan = morning

aben = evening

guten = good

hallo = hello

nain = no

and plenty more not good at it though :) My bro learnt German as he's off to Germany in sept. So I learnt quite a bit from him (Spellings may be wrong though )

I have a database of hundreds of thousands of German words (spelled correctly). Thinking of publishing it in many formats. 

Doing some market research here: do you think anybody would be interested in buying such a product? [Not a dictionary, just words sorted in different ways - just raw list of words in alphabetic order; those with certain letters in them; palindromes; verb lists; noun lists; words with particular letter in particular place, with numbers of letters (good for crosswords), etc]

In fact I have databases for most languages and alphabetic systems from which I could produce lexicons, vocabularies and dictionaries - including English (all variations). 

Is anyone else interested in words of all forms, structure, and meaning? I could eventually produce a list of words constructed from the same letters but in different languages!

Your feedback would be interesting - but so as not to high-jack this thread any further, perhaps contact me with your comments, and even ideas for JV's, by messaging me in the Wizzley way.

BTW I'm using Cornish as my start language to produce various e-books / Kindle products to test through the process (as per the 'Self Publishing' forum thread).

Hey, soon means "really soon". We are just implementing a countdown on Wizzley's homepage :)

There will still be social links (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in your profile and one extra website link. It's on the top right corner. We'll probably change this a bit to make it more visible. Possibly, we'll also add the option to feature one selected article inside the profile, additionally to the Wizzography.

Our major design update will happen at 1 AM CDT (American Central Time), early Friday morning. TONIGHT!

Wizzley will be down for approx. 2 hours (or less).

We're excited!   

Very cool look.  :)  Loving the new style.

Charles, it doesn't look like the individual pages are that different, but the bios look really great.  Excited!

Humagaia: this sort of database can be used (and already is) for instance in SuperMemo learning systems. They are on-line for more than a decade, just go to their site with COM extension. I have used some of their databases to improve my vocabulary in English and Italian and have also made several databases for learning for my exams (mostly chemistry stuff).

If I remember correctly (that was in previous century really), they offered distribution of databases like yours through their site. Check and see for yourself.

Thanks, I'll check it out

L.E.A. only got 'til tomoz b4 finding out! - but I'm out all day - so won't see it b4 u do

Looks wonderful!  I really wish I could read some of those pages!!

I love the bio look too.