Chinasmack & Chinageeks In Chinese!

[phyrex]

Chinasmack is a guilty pleasure for me, and Chinageeks is generally a very interesting read. They usually translate interesting comments from Chinese forums into English there and put the original Chinese in a mouseover window. Since I want to learn Chinese and not English, I wrote a little script that takes their Websites/RSS feeds and just switches the English and Chinese around, so now you see the original Chinese in the text, and the English translation in the mouse-over (and I also added the English in very very light gray after the Chinese, to make copy&pasting easier for when I want to put something in my SRS).

Update May 27:

Here are versions for viewing in the webbrowser:

Zhongwensmack: http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://www.chinasmack.com/

Zhongwengeeks: http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://chinageeks.org/

The links for the altered RSS feeds are:

Chinasmack -> Zhongguosmack: http://www.lingobuy.com/zwsregex.xml

Chinageeks -> Zhongguogeeks: http://www.lingobuy.com/zhongguogeeks.xml

Update July 27:

It is now possible to deactive the English popups for the Chinese text by adding a "&popup=false" to the end of the URL. Here is a chinageeks example:

http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://chinageeks.org/2010/06/two-corrupt-officialspoets-and-renting-literary-clout/&popup=false

Also, why I was at it, I made the gray English text an option. The parameter for that would be "&english=false". So if I wanted just the Chinese AND no popup, the URL would look like this:

http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://chinageeks.org/2010/06/two-corrupt-officialspoets-and-renting-literary-clout/&english=false&popup=false

Of course this also means you could do Chinese only but with the popup:

http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://chinageeks.org/2010/06/two-corrupt-officialspoets-and-renting-literary-clout/&english=false&popup=true

The default behavior is still English AND popup. This is probably not the best solution, but I'm not sure which one is. Opinions?

Please let me know if you have any questions or find any bugs!

Edited July 27, 2010 at 09:22 AM by phyrex

[HerrPetersen]

Sounds pretty cool. You got some noob advice on how to get it running? Without having an RSS reader installed I only get a link list, all in english.

[tooironic]

Chinasmack is good fun. That Chinageeks website you posted though is redirecting to www.all.com :S

[phyrex]

@HerrPetersen: Lol, right! Too many R&S TLAs ;)

I don't know how you'd read RSS without an RSS reader though. If you have a gmail account try the google reader, shouldn't be too hard to set up!

@TooIronic: Oh, you're right! Thanks for catching that.

I fixed both in the original post!

[HerrPetersen]

Thanks, works like a charm

[SunDaYu]

You're awesome. I've been wanting to know what the actual Chinese is on Chinasmack for the longest time. Thanks a bunch!

[a-xing]

How can I express my love for you!?　

I always waste so much time reading ChinaSMACK when I should be studying.

[phyrex]

How can I express my love for you!?　

I always waste so much time reading ChinaSMACK when I should be studying.

Haha, that depends to a good degree on whether you're male or female! ;D

[phyrex]

I grew annoyed by only having this in my RSS reader, and not also in my webbrowser, where I could also read items that weren't in the RSS feed anymore, so I slapped another little script together, that does the same thing, only this time in the browser. Here you go:

Zhongwensmack: http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://www.chinasmack.com/

Zhongwengeeks: http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://chinageeks.org/

It seems to be working well enough for me, but if you catch any bugs let me know!

[phyrex]

Update: The RSS feed link now points to the modified homepages, so that if you choose to open the website article in your RSS reader (like I usually do, to read it later), it will now point to the "Chinese" version.

[-葛亚辉-]

This is pretty cool! Do you track the feeds at all? I'm just curious because for stat-tracking purposes, I'd love to know how many people are following our site via your RSS feeds/mirror site.

In fact, if you're interested, we should discuss merging this into the actual site and making it a feature for Chinese learners. Not that our translations are perfect (or even close), but just reading the Chinese text is probably useful to an extent. Get in touch via email if you're interested.

-C. Custer (ChinaGeeks admin) custerc @ gmail dot calm.

[phyrex]

I wrote you an email!

[SunDaYu]

The websites are not working at the moment. Also, I have a suggestion. Would you be able to remove the automatic English pop-ups when you scroll over the Chinese text? I like to use Firefox translators to translate the words I don't know, but the entire English translation pops up over it when I scroll over the words. Other than that, good job! Reading these sites in Chinese is a lot more fun than random news sites.

[phyrex]

You're right, thanks. My provider likes to tinker, and regularly breaks my scripts, and I don't notice it until I try to use them (or sb tells me!).

I don't know if anybody else needs the bubbles, but I'll see what I can do, as soon as the script works again.

Glad you like it.

[phyrex]

Sorry for the late answer. I fixed the script a while ago, but I didn't get to do the changes you asked for, SunDaYu. But I did them now.

It is now possible to deactive that popups by adding a "&popup=false" to the end of the URL. Chinasmack seems to be down at the moment, but this here is a chinageeks example:

http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://chinageeks.org/2010/06/two-corrupt-officialspoets-and-renting-literary-clout/&popup=false

Also, why I was at it, I made the gray English text an option. So if I wanted just the Chinese AND no popup, the URL would look like this:

http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://chinageeks.org/2010/06/two-corrupt-officialspoets-and-renting-literary-clout/&english=false&popup=false

Of course this also means you could do Chinese only but with the popup:

http://www.lingobuy.com/cgi-bin/zwswebsite.py?url=http://chinageeks.org/2010/06/two-corrupt-officialspoets-and-renting-literary-clout/&english=false&popup=true

The default behavior is still English AND popup. This is probably not the best solution, but I'm not sure which one is. Opinions?

[Tian Li]

Woah, this is excellent. I'm a big fan of both those sites. Great stuff! I got tired mousing over the text the whole time.