Geir Arne Brevik, December 21 2005:
GAB.NET 10 Year Anniversary: I'm going English!
For ten years I’ve been maintaining/neglecting this website, doing so in whatever style was fashionable at the time. My first site from 1995 had gif-animations and extensive use of frames. The 1998-edition was kind of portal-esque and 2001/2002 had Flash written all over it. Now? Blogging, of course.
I’m very happy I made all those mistakes. I hope I’ll make new ones. A perfect website, with many years of growing visitor numbers would probably have been best, but I’ve learned so much from tearing this site apart time after time.
Now I’ve done it again. I’ve switched blog system from Movable Type to the new cool (although immature) kid in town; Typo. I’ve changed the design to something I quite like, even if it’s not finished. But most importantly; I’ve decided to change the language of this site from Norwegian to English. It has been a hard decision, and I’ll tell you why:
Why keep this site in Norwegian
- I know Norwegian. Not just the words, but the language, and the references behind it. I can play with it, and communicate in several layers at once. That’s hard for me in English.
- I like to support Norwegian. We are only about 4.5 million people speaking this part traditional, part constructed language. Not only are we under constant pressure from Anglo-American pop culture, but the whole vocabulary of professions like mine (web development) are in English. I’d like to counter that.
- All the archive material on this site is in Norwegian, and it seems corny to have a site where the navigation is in one language, while the content is in another? Right?
- I often can’t see my own spelling mistakes in English. I cry when I think about all the errors that you can see, that I (and my spell-checker) don’t.
Why change to English (the arguments that won me over)
- I’ll never get any better in English if I don’t write more.
- Almost all the sites I’d like to refer to, are in English. Just look at my del.icio.us-account
- There are many people on the web that suck when it comes to English grammar. Some of them have blogs. Some of them are cool.
- There’s no blogosphere for Norwegian web developers writing in Norwegian. No del.icio.us-links, no Technorati-buzz. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to myself. Looking at my visitor logs, I can see that I am. That’s boring. That’s going to change in 2006.
That’s it, really. I’m going after one thing, and one thing only: Visitors. And then, Google Ads. Corny or not; My visitors (you) will still have to deal with a occational post in Norwegian, when I’m writing about Norwegian radio or local bands from my childhood.
