* Ian Forrester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2006-03-07 15:49-0000] > > Following a conversation with Dan Brickley, who pointed me to Ian > Forrester's post on BBC Persian being filtered in Iran (see > http://www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/culture/?permalink=BBC-Persian-filtered-out-of-Iran-what-can-we-do.html), > I am now running a first version of a Persian (Farsi) news bot, along > similar lines as the newsflash bots. As Dan suggested, this could be one > additional means of bypassing the Iranian firewall... > ---- > Sounds like a good idea ;) I'll let the Persian service know, as they > might be very interested in your news bot. >
Yes, this looks great. Nice work Mario! Whether this approach actually gets adopted is probably beyond the scope of this list. I'm interested in what the Persian service think of it... I posted a screen grab at http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/109247073/in/photostream/ > > > Currently the bot is only running on MSN, and although I managed to get > the right-to-left issue to work using the official MSN client (in my case > Windows Live Messenger beta), it seems that not all 3rd party clients support > the "X-MMS-IM-Format" field (where I set the R-to-L orientation), so for > example Trillian ignores it and displays the messages incorrectly L-to-R. I > haven't tried other clients yet. > ---- > Interesting issue, I'm trying it in Gaim which has great Unicode and > multiple language support. Good to see the I18N support in these tools getting exercised... > I don't speak/read Farsi or Arabic, so can't really tell if the content > is ok (although I compared it visually to what's on the BBC website to get > some idea). I use the nearly-full-text feed at > http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/persian/index.xml (I believe Ian set that up?), and > have noticed some strange HTML tags in the feeds, all of which (rightly or > wrongly) also make it into the bot messages.. in addition, the menu-type > texts are all in English for now, and should really be translated. > ---- > Maybe if I speak to someone in the Persian service they might be able > to let you know if it looks and reads correctly. > Can you let me know what tags your getting as I might be outputting too > much. I saw some <p> and <img/> , <strong> </p> and even <p/> in one article, amongst other fragments. > > The bot is on MSN as "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". Once you join, you'll get the > 10 most recent news headlines from http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/persian/index.xml > every hour, to which you can respond with a number (1 to 10) to see more > details for the news headline you're interested in (I decided to change this > from the way the English news flashes work due to the feeds containing much > more text, so it wasn't practical to send all news details in one message). > --- > Ok I've tested your bot and it seems to work really well. It would be > great to get this on other networks. I think we may have someone from Jabber > who could help on this list. Yup, Jabber should at least have clean I18N. For Persian in particular I think Yahoo IM would be good; anecdotally, it seems more popular than MSN in Iran. I don't know of any hard stats though. So this is definitely a cool piece of technology. I wonder now whether it risks getting generic IM blocked in Iran... Dan > In Gaim the Persian text is correctly displayed right to left and > English text is left to right. It looks great! :) - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
