Events are about to start for the International Mother Language Day, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The first item of the day will be an opening panel with the Director-General of UNESCO, the chair of their executive board, the permanent representative of Bangladesh, and Adama Samassekou of the African Academy of Languages.

We have just promoted our new search system to the top left of every Kamusi page. We have been testing the new system for several weeks, and hope that we have managed to fix all the bugs. If not, please let us know!

What are the differences between the new search and the "classic" search? Our hope is that you will not notice any differences at the outset. (For techies, the old search was written in Perl, which we need to retire in order to make our entire site consistent within a Drupal/ PHP environment.) The initial goal is to have the new search, written in a new programming language, produce exactly the same results for the user.

Beginning today, the Kamusi Project will undertake a slow transition to our new domain name: Kamusi.org - "kamusi," of course, is the Swahili word for "dictionary." We moved the project from its university incubator to a stand-alone site a little over a year ago. At the time, kamusiproject.org was the only reasonable domain name that was available. Kamusi.com was taken, kamusi.org was taken, and even kamusiproject.com was already owned by someone else!

I've just come across a new Facebook tool that makes it much easier for users of that service to keep track of Kamusi Project news from this blog. If you are a Facebook user, please go to http://apps.new.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/kamusi_editors_blog and subscribe to that page. When you do, you will have a simple way to know when this blog has been updated, without having to click through to this site to keep up to date.

Nimegundua zana mpya kwa watumiaji wa Facebook ili kurahisisha namna ya kufuata blogu hii. Tafahadhali tembelea http://apps.new.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/kamusi_editors_blog ili kujiandikisha. Baadaye, utaweza kujua nikiandika ujumbe mpya, bila kufika kwenye ukurasa huu kutarifiwa.

Asanteni,
Martin

Spotted in Dar es Salaam and posted on the blog louder than swahili is this new kanga congratulating East Africa's favorite grandson:

We are getting ready to re-design the Kamusi Project website, in order to introduce new features and new languages. To help us prepare, please send us your thoughts about:

* design ideas, including layout, colors, graphics, fonts, etc
* features that you would like to see added
* things that you don't like on the current site

What design aspects do you admire from other web sites? What do other sites do that we should avoid at all costs?

Please email us using the contact form on the left, or use the comments feature below.

Thanks!

The Kamusi Duka, where you can support the project through your purchase of clothing, mugs, and our world-famous Swahili Clock, is once again working at full strength.

Last month we suffered from two service outages that took the Kamusi Project offline for a total of almost two weeks. These outages were debilitating, but there was nothing we could do about them. We rent server space from a hosting company that had a some system-wide malfunctions that knocked all their customers offline. For those outages, we were just stuck, like airline passengers stranded in an airport during a blizzard.

What may be more frustrating, though, is a problem we just found out about yesterday. When we got the site back online after the first outage from our hosting company, we apparently changed something in an obscure configuration file. (For tech-heads, the problem was in the Drupal browsercap module.) This setting made it difficult or impossible for some users to access the site - but for several weeks we had no idea the problem existed.

This is why WE REALLY NEED YOU to write in to shida {at} kamusiproject {dot} org with bug reports whenever you encounter a problem. Our website is complex, has tens of thousands of pages, and we are undergoing major behind-the-scenes development. However, sometimes we make a change that works fine on our computer set-up, but turns out does not work universally. So we need your eyes and ears on the Kamusi Project Rapid Response Team to alert us if something goes wrong.

Through ANLoc, the African Network for Localization, the Kamusi Project is proud to be involved with a project to create Locales for 100 African languages. The following presentation provides an introduction to the initiative:

We have been working with one of our Code Africa volunteers to develop a little widget that people can insert in blogs and web pages to perform Kamusi lookups on their sites. The widget is not quite finished, but we put together the following brief presentation for a meeting yesterday in Nairobi: