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Did You Make Wish #7208?

I received an email from a Wish visitor asking me “What if we could help make the wish come true? how do we contact the person?” Turned out it was related to wish #7208 “i wish adam would send me a painting.” It also turned out that the email sender was a painter (I googled her name).

I explained to her that the wishes were made anonymously and I couldn’t trace the wishers. The best I can do is to blog about it and hope that the wisher returns to the site and reads about this.

It’s a long shot, but worth trying. After all, anything can happen on the Internet.

If you are the person who made wish #7208. We would like to know if Adam sent you the painting. And if you’re interested to get a painting, please send an email to wish@qoqoa.com and let us know who Adam is and what the painting is about. I will keep your and the artist’s anonimity, unless you prefer otherwise.

I understand that the kind gesture made by the artist can be abused by anyone, hence I’ll leave the decision to her to determine the genuineness of the wish-claimant.

Random Project Updates

Haven’t made any project related post since July last year, so here’s a list of little things I spent some time on:

• While playing around with Firefox Web Developer Extension, I found out that some Maven reports generated invalid HTML which could break the reports layout with non-default vm templates. Hence MFINDBUGS-29, MCHECKSTYLE-74, and MCHANGES-83.
• After integrating Kaptcha in SCode Plugin 0.5, I spent some time working on the Kaptcha project itself where most of the effort was on refactoring the original SimpleCaptcha code. That, and some other patches have made it to Kaptcha 2.1 and 2.2 .
• I replaced all usages of JMock with EasyMock on all of my Java projects (I know, a stupid thing to do because EasyMock-ing is also no fun). Looking forward to giving Mockito a try at work. No, there will be no effort to replace EasyMock with Mockito regardless of the outcome.
• As mentioned on my Slicehosted post, I rewrote Wish using Rails. I also spent more time playing with Ruby/Rails and I could see why some people love them. Personally, I’m still leaning towards Java. I think static typing is better in the long run. My take on the whole Ruby vs Java fiasco… people have different perspectives and opinions, there’s not one true programming language nirvana, Ruby and Java communities will learn to co-exist peacefully.
• Since this blog is now using WordPress (damn, I hate upgrading WordPress everytime there’s a security fix), and because there hadn’t been any activity in Blojsom development, I decided to stop following Blojsom mailing lists for now. Nabble shows that I’ve been posting since July 2005 to February 2008, it didn’t feel that long at all :). I will still maintain the Blojsom plugins I created and I still have some patches to contribute to Blojsom core.

Der Wunsch: Offline… Leider

While working on a mini improvement request for Wish (more on that later), I found out that Der Wunsch is now ‘almost’ offline. Here’s the Babel Fish translation of the message on Der Wunsch home page:

Off-line… Unfortunately
The web page is unfortunately for indefinite time off-line, since I must worry about other projects.

That’s about a year and a half since Der Wunsch came to life. Thanks for the effort, Claus.

Now, back to the mini improvement. I’ve received several feedbacks and was finally able to complete the first request from Machi.

i really like this website. i think it would be better if u could search the wishes by number, rather then just keywords. just a thought

I’ve made the change to reflect this request. So now when someone searches for a number, the wish with an ID of that number will be presented first before any other wishes with the number as part of their description text.

Other improvements from the rest of the feedbacks, comin’ right up!

Wish Appears On The First Page Of Google Search For The Word ‘wish’

It was a nice surprise to find out that Wish web site appears on the first page (ranked 8th) of Google.com.au search result for the word ‘wish’. Yes, that’s right. ‘wish’, that’s it, just the 4-letter word.

And it’s currently ranked 5th on google.com. Whoa! That’s a superb result considering that the site does not have the word ‘wish’ itself as part of the domain name (mbledug.com) or even a sub domain, and ‘wish’ only appears as a context path in the full URL http://mbledug.com/wish . Plus it doesn’t hurt to have other sites linking to Wish, like Lifehacker.

There are currently 1800+ submitted wishes, which means there are probably about 1800+ times the word ‘wish’ appear on the site. Is content still king? It probably still is.

Here’s the rank list for various Google local domains of several English-speaking countries.

Not bad, eh? :)

Der Wunsch

About a week ago, Claus Morell contacted me about his plan to implement a German version of Wish. Lo and behold, it’s now live at www.derwunsch.de. It also has an RSS feed. Good stuff, Claus!

Language support has been an interesting issue with Wish. When the web site started receiving some submissions in Italian, Portuguesse, and some other languages I couldn’t recognize, I thought about having multiple language sections a la Wikipedia. I didn’t go ahead with that because I knew I wouldn’t have enough time to implement and maintain it.

I came up with a ‘temporary workaround’ for approving those languages foreign to me. For Portuguesse / Spanish submissions, I hassled Devin, my Brazilian friend who obviously is fluent in those languages. For Italian, I hassled another friend who has been learning Italian for some time. Not wanting to waste their time after several translations, I decided to replace them with Babel Fish.

Wrong move. Babel Fish is no replacement for my translator friends, its translations to English sometimes ended up as weird sentences. So I gave up translating those submissions to English one by one, and asked the submitters to use Babel Fish and translate their wishes to English before submitting them. I reckoned if they arrive at the web site, then their English must be better than my knowledge of their language plus Babel Fish’s translation. It worked… or it chased away all those non-English speakers.

If anyone else is interested to run the site in another language but do not wish to implement anything, check out Wish project page, we have Java and Rails flavors. Or better yet, extend the current implementation to support multi language sections.