Southwest Florida Blog

The first time I ate at Scuttlebutts, I had their garlic chicken wings.  The wings were large and juicy.  The savory sauce was chock-full of freshly minced garlic.  Delicious!

This time around I decided to go with their pulled pork sandwich.  Prior to, I had heard about this fabled treat being the best of its kind in Southwest Florida.  Now, I know why.

Unlike other pulled pork sandwiches I have had, the Texas toast style bread was manageable even to the last bite.  The Scuttlebutts version of this traditional Southern mainstay was not drowned in sauce like the others.  I could actually taste the flavor and feel the tenderness of the meat without being awash in sauce.  Amazing!

I had a choice of chips or Coleslaw and baked beans.  The slaw and beans were just right.  The slaw: crisp and subtle.  The beans: flavorful and complementary.

The cozy, friendly atmosphere of this hole-in-the-wall, treasure of a restaurant lends itself as one of the best kept secrets in Cape Coral.  However, the tale of the Best Pulled Pork Sandwich is a remarkable one and must be told.

[Source: My review of Scuttlebutt's pulled pork sandwich on Yelp]

Eric Taubert unequivocally states that Yabo Restaurant in Fort Myers has the best lasagna in Southwest Florida. [See: 2:36 of Episode 3 of The Cape Coral Barometer's Pressure Drop video blog.] He hails them as "undefeated champions".

Back in February 2008, BusinessWire.com described the best lasagna (outside of Italy) to be had at Naples Tomato. Not having tried either, I like to think that Mr. Taubert is shedding light on "one of those places you either hear about or into which you stumble serendipitously" (as Karen Feldman eloquently puts things in her review of Yabo for Florida-Weekly.com)

In the last segment of the video, the Nirvana Restaurant of Fort Myers grand opening celebration is given a brief mention. I have had the good fortune of trying Nirvana's delicious, spring rolls. I look forward to a Taubert review of the newly opened Indian restaurant in Fort Myers.

 

Delicious.com, that (personally) ubiquitous bookmarking site, was down for just under an hour this evening.  It had been acting up earlier this week so it came as no real big suprise that something might give.  And of course, my local backup from the Delicious export feature was over a month old.

Using the service around a handful of times a day, and having experienced a similar outage in the not to memorable past, had prepared me for the moment.  It has even motivated me to update my business networking page which suffered an unfortunate, yet neatly div-contained 500 Internal Server Error in addition to the disappearance of its associated tag cloud.

Speaking of clouds (and computing), chalk another one up for a more than welcome slap-in-the-face wake up call for me to backup more often.  To boot, the following have now been moved forward on my to-do list:

• Update 'companies' page with more robust static code vs. heavy reliance on feeds.
• Document the HTML document parsing experience and share code on personal blog.
• Link this mini-project to the related entry in the web tools section of the main page.

To the credit of Delicious.com: they had things up and running again before I could screencap the aforementioned error notice (not-so-much to my chagrin).

 

NirvanaFusion.com ·  Indian Fusion Cusine

The update to the Nirvana Restaurant website coincides with their recent grand opening celebration (October 2009).

The new site is themed to resemble the print menus at the restaurant.

Here are some features that make the site stand out:

• Indian elephant in ornamental headgear background image is a watermark that stays fixed as menus and content scroll.
• Text headings in cursive font are selectable and searchable.  Compare this technique to replacing text with images.

See also: Nirvana Restaurant review

 

 

Q: What do a six foot tall chicken and a mushroom cloud in the skies of Southwest Florida have in common?

A: They both made for a memorable trip to Sonic Burger and BJ's Wholesale Club.

As if an outing to Sonic Burger on a Wednesday night weren't exciting enough, a spectacular mushroom shaped cloud appeared before us as we exited the BJ's Wholesale Club in Cape Coral, the second leg of what should have been an uneventful 'getting out of the house' moment.

The intense visual was slowly lost to the horizon as we proceeded south on Del Prado Boulevard and neared the Midpoint Bridge.   However, that's when our attention flipped suddenly to the great bird.  Standing at least six foot tall with a (waving) wing span to match, the giant, fowl-ordered entity beckoned to us.  If I had not already had the chicken strip sandwich at Sonic, I would have surely fallen victim to its caws.

Below are the mobile photos that I managed to take (at wing's length) ...

 

Heather Brooks describes her music as "soulful smart pop".  However, "She" by Heather Brooks Music bears a refreshingly dark tint that  pulls away from the pop and light tone of her other tracks.  The industrial bassline and tribal beat combines well with Brooks versatile vocals.  The lyrics of "She" portray a woman giving into her inner 'sinner' thoughtfully and without remorse.

Brett: What? Jules: What country are you from? Brett: What? What? Wh - ? Jules: "What" ain't no country I've ever heard of. They speak English in What? Brett: What? Jules: English, motherfucker, do you speak it? Brett: Yes! Yes! Jules: Then you know what I'm sayin'! Brett: Yes! [Source: Pulp Fiction (1994) - Memorable quotes]

The World Wide Web

Dave Chaffey estimates that "two-thirds of internet surfers (amounting to about 900 million people) search in languages other than English." In his article, Mr. Chaffey notes popular search engines (other than Google) used by peoples around the world. He also makes a case against direct translation in favor of translating 'from scratch' to better reach a target audience through content localization.

What is Localization?

Language localization, according to Wikipedia, is "the second phase of a larger process (Internationalisation) of product translation and cultural adaptation (for specific countries, regions, groups) to account for differences in distinct markets." In other words, it is not enough to have one's website content readable in another language through translation alone. In order to be effective internationally, content must take cultural nuances into consideration, as well. For example, it is one thing for an international reader to understand the words contained within a web document (take the title of this blog post, for instance.) It would be better, however, if the reader (locals included) had actually seen the movie that is being referenced. Without this level of cultural awareness and/or connectivity, this post could very well leave a reader in a "WTF?" state (in their respective lexicon, of course.) In this article, a comparison of three(3) sites is drawn that highlights the first step in localization: translation. Sites one and two make use of the Google translate tool. The third site appears to be translated by hand.

1. Land-Merchants.com
2. ServingSouthwestFlorida.net
3. Efektim.com

The second step that involves cultural adaptation is outside the scope of this review. Please comment below with your real world examples of failures to connect culturally.

Land-Merchants.com

The Land-Merchant.com site has a translation widget (highlighted in yellow) on its main page. After selecting a national flag or choosing a language from the pull-down menu, the page is reloaded in a Google frame where the textual content is automatically translated. The process is speedy and convenient. The tool even operates on the text links located in the left and top-right navigational panes. However, when the links are clicked, they lead to the (original) referenced page in English.

ServingSouthwestFlorida.net

Like the Land-Merchant.com website, ServingSouthwestFlorida.net makes use of the Google translate tool (in yellow, lower-right). The tool has been incorporated into a WordPress plugin that allows for the automatic translation of posts and comments. Again, after choosing a language, the site opens in a Google frame (top) where text (including links and tags) are translated. The header image (top-left) is not affected. The Global Translator plugin also creates links that lead to pages that continue to translate without actually leaving the Google frame. However, portions of the site that rely on existing PHP and JavaScript elements breakdown during translation. Site search queries result in English output. The FeedJit widget and the tabbed menu are noticeably incorrect and omitted, respectively.

Efektim.com

The Efektim.com site redirects to the English ('en' subdirectory) version of itself. It can be safely assumed that Czech, German and Russian browsers are redirected accordingly. Regardless, each of the four language versions that the site supports can be viewed by clicking on a flag link (in yellow, top-right). The translations within the site are consistent and extend through to individual property listings. More importantly, words in all of its supported languages have been indexed by Google.

So ... WTF Now?

Both Land-Merchant.com and ServingSouthwestFlorida.net are working examples of how easy it is to add the Google translate tool to an existing website. There are certain limitations, but offering visitors a quick way to view your content in their preferred language(s) is becoming an increasingly important option. Efektim.com represents a localized website ideal. If you are fortunate enough to be fluent in more than one language and/or have associates who are, converting your local site into a localized one is a no-brainer.

The resulting, generated RSS feeds were then analyzed for properly functioning links and relevant link descriptions (titles).

Page Sample	Native RSS?	Titles OK?	Links OK?	Page Rank
bluechipbizsolutions.net/ display-fstar.asp?featured=go	no	n/a	n/a	n/a
bnntimes.com/pages/Articles	no	no	yes	1
capecoralflcoc.weblinkconnect.com/ CWT/External/WCPages/WCDirectory/ Directory.aspx?CategoryID=420 &Title=COMPUTER &AdKeyword=COMPUTER	yes/no	yes	no	4
fortmyersnfl.com	yes	yes	yes	2
jbrooksai.com/services.html	no	yes	yes	1
servingsouthwestflorida.net/work	yes	yes	yes	n/a
showmethenetworking.com	no	no	yes	1
wireswfl.com/directory.html	no	n/a	n/a	n/a

• 'Native RSS' indicates whether or not an RSS source was found within the listed website.
• A title refers to the descriptive text that is clicked in order to follow a link.
• Links should point to a page that corresponds to its title.
• 'Page Rank' is a numerical rating system that Google uses to classify web pages. Ten (10) is the highest rank. Higher ranking pages are more likely to appear before lower ranking pages in search results. This value is subject to change.

• BluechipBizSolutions.net and WIRESWFL.com could not be processed by Ponyfish. The sites were, however, fully operational at test time.

• The links in the RSS feeds for BNNTimes.com and ShowMeTheNetworking.com were correct, but the titles were not.

• CapeCoralChamber.com has an RSS feed for its event calendar, but not its business directory.

• FortMyersNFL.com and ServingSouthwestFlorida.net both have RSS feeds available on their main pages. Ponyfish RSS Feed Builder was able to correctly identify this feature.

• For a site without native RSS, the JBrooksAI.com sample produced the best RSS feed in terms of accurate titles and links. Most, if not all of its web pages are static and written in HTML.

"The fastest, easiest way to add Google Maps to any website"
[excerpt from site]

What Is It?

MapMyPage is a javascript program that can identify street, city and country (mailing) addresses on your web page(s). You can read more about the included features below. Or, you can see it in action. To open the map, click the globe icon on resulting page.

What Does It Do?

Almost immediately after installing a little, globe icon link is placed next to the address contained within your web page automatically. When clicked, a Google Maps box/window (centered on the referenced location) appears within the page itself. Check out the screenshots below to see a few of the map views and features that become available to your website visitors.

Click the square button to maximize the box window. Click the 'x' to close.

Once an informational balloon is closed, you can drag and zoom the map.

You can zoom from 'Satellite' view to 'Street View' by using the menu buttons at the top of the map window.

Entering a search term or locale in the search box will produce matches directly on the map.

You can even view user submitted, on location photos by checking 'Photos' under the 'More' button.

How Do I Install It?

1. Visit the project page.
2. Copy and paste the script (code) between the <head> and </head> tags of the web pages you want map links (little globe icons) to appear.
3. Use the <div class="maps_off"> tag to disable automatic mapping on any portion of a web page.