The other day it dawned on me that my hobby website, My Cycling Log, has a large international audience and that I should cater more to them. My Cycling Log is basically exactly what its name suggests: an online cycling log. It’s a place for cyclists to log their rides, share their achievements with their friends and the world, and organize themselves into groups. The site is constantly evolving largely driven by user feedback.
My first step in making My Cycling Log friendlier for international users was to implement user-specific timezones. This is a no brainer. PHP handles timezones quite elegantly using the date_default_timezone_set function.
The second step is to internationalize the text. An article on IBM’s website lays it out very clearly: How to internationalize PHP apps. I’m still looking for translators, but I will update this post once I begin the process.
Jesse Englert | 02-May-07 at 6:23 pm | Permalink
Building localization into your apps is good even if you only plan on supporting one language now. It forces you to centralize all your strings and you never know what your app with require in the future.