I've written about problems with the Global Translator plugin before. I managed to get it to work with the last version of WordPress. I didn't realize until a few minutes ago that it doesn't work with my upgrade to version 2.3.

As of right now, it's off my blog for good and it won't be making a reappearance later on down the road. I didn't link to it this time for a reason. I don't want anyone else pulling their hair out over a plugin that isn't worth the trouble for all the trouble it causes.

In fact, I'm never going to put a translation option on this blog again. What a waste of time!

When it comes to the Wordpress Global Translator Plugin, I feel like such a loser. You can use it on your blog(s) without any problems, once you activate it and then update your permalink structure. The last step is crucial. Never let it be said that I'm anywhere in the vicinity of perfect when it comes to telling you about these things.

I originally mentioned the plugin in my article, Use A Translation Plugin To Get More Readers!, and I was absolutely right about that. The number of readers from non-English speaking countries increased tremendously. That readership base continued to grow and my Alexa statistics proved it as my rank ultimately reached the 50K mark. With Alexa, lower is better.

I really screwed up when I disabled the translator. I wrote about it when I made some radical adjustments. Although the non-English speaking countries were the lowest amount of readers in percentage terms, the effect of cutting them off caused my Alexa rank to rise again (getting worse). It wasn't working right on my blog and I didn't know why and that's why I deactivated it.

I reactivated it, as I wrote in The Global Translator is Back on My Blog, after the plugin author contacted me. I then removed it again, as I mentioned briefly in my Blog Drive-Bys for 2007-07-17. I didn't want to make a big deal out it that time because I was thinking that I must have been doing something wrong. Every time I tested it, either there were layout errors or the translation service wouldn't cooperate, treating the queries as spam. Naturally, I made the mistaken assumption that comment spammers were abusing it. That wasn't true — it was happening because the queries from my blog were malformed.

While looking for answers, today I came across a post by Lorelle on WordPress that mentioned this plugin. I spotted, in the fourth comment, her note to go to Options, Permalinks, and Update Permalink Structure. I took a chance and reactivated the plugin and then did exactly that. Every error that I had previously seen and the problems with the translation services (Google and Alta Vista) disappeared. No changes to the .htaccess file needed to be made, but I had never gone through that step before and I don't know why it was required. I went back to the plugin author's site and it's not mentioned at all. (Correction: It's mentioned in the 0.6 change that it's automatic. Apparently, that isn't true in all cases.)

I took the previous version of the WordPress Global Translator plugin out prior to installing the http:BL WordPress Plugin because 1) The layout didn't work right after translation and 2) spammers were accessing it more than humans.

I received a message from the plugin author yesterday, asking me to try the latest revision. I hesitated until this evening because installing and configuring plugins can be a pain if they don't work right the first time.

I'm happy to say that this revision works properly and I no longer have to worry about email harvesters and other low-life spammers using the translated pages to throw comment spam onto. I notified the author that it worked as designed and I plan to keep it as long as things don't go awry with it and I don't see an increase in comment spam. Google indexes the translated pages as well as the original, so there are more links indexed when using the translator.

One thing I'd noticed since removing the translator on May 10th is that the number of visitors from the countries where people speak those languages had decreased dramatically. I didn't think it would have that much of an impact, but it did. I had been considering putting in a much older version (that worked right) before receiving the email message from the author. It was just good timing that he told me about it when he did so that I wouldn't have to mess with it twice.

So there you have it, from someone who has used it and not used it and is using it again. A bit of caution: These translations are not even close to being 100 percent correct, but may help you some if you speak English as a second language.

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For various reasons (including sleep), I haven't done a fraction of what I wanted to do today. After getting some much needed rest, I think I'll be back in top form in a matter of hours. Look for more drive-bys and external links coming up in the next post.

When I made some adjustments before, I was concentrating on making the visual layout a little more appealing. Today, I did something more radical and I plan to keep it that way.

I deactivated the global translator and removed the widget for it from my right sidebar. There were several reasons. First, it didn't work quite right. Second, after checking logs and when comment spam came in, I found that spammers were using it more than anyone else. Third, it wouldn't work at all without its own cache being on (the translate engines kept flagging them as spam URLs). There were too many bad reasons to keep it on there and not enough good reasons. Since my blog is in English and my target audience (if you can call it that) are English speakers (even as a second language), I'm not worried about losing readers. The majority of my readers come from:

• US
• UK
• Philippines
• Canada
• India
• Romania
• Australia
• Malaysia

Guess what? There were no translations available for any of those (other than the English-speaking countries) anyway.

The other thing I did, which I tested a week ago, is to make the sidebars load after the content. It involved moving one line in five different files and not that hard at all. Yesterday, I moved the third party widgets to the end of the right sidebar. Now, when you load a page, you see the content first, then the sidebars, and then the footer. If the right sidebar and footer takes a little longer than usual, it no longer matters — you get to see the page you're looking for right away because of the display order.

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Blog Appreciation:

Dosh Dosh always has an article or two of interest to most bloggers. I just added it to my feed reader!

I saw the WordPress Global Translator Plugin over on eJabs over a month ago and thought that it looked cool. That was about it. On March 4, I decided to plug it into my own blog. I didn't do it because I thought it was useful; I did it because I thought it would look cool.

Matthew Jabs recently wrote a post about his first Google AdSense payment and then followed it up later with another post about getting below the ranking of 100,000 on Technorati. Has he just been lucky?

Both posts forced me to sit back and analyze my own blog to see where my shortcomings are. Beside the fact that I just can't write, there should be another reason my website isn't growing in popularity as quickly as it should. After looking through my statistics and logs, I found it. It came up and slapped me across the head like I was a one-armed, red-headed stepchild.

Since I installed the plugin, the number of my readers who use the languages of French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Arabic has increased tremendously. I installed it almost a month after Matt did and his readership shows the difference.