Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

We've been hunting around the 'Net for German supermarkets and other retail stores so that we can prepare our budget. Funny thing though, our dictionary is next to useless in translating German shopping phrases. Anyone else planning to visit Germany using a motorhome or caravan might find some of the links useful. I've also given some basic translations to some of the words and phrases you might find on the supermarket sites.

The supermarkets we've found so far include Real, Penny Markt, Rewe, Kaiser's Tengelmann, Lidl, extra, Aldi (Nord), Aldi (Süd)

When I first started looking through these sites to find prices for groceries I was disappointed with a few of them, some don't seem to give very much info about prices at all, and others seem to require a German postcode before they let you see their pricelist. The translations aren't strictly based on a dictionary. I'm discovering that literal translations just don't work. In emails I've sent to German speakers they have generally not understood me because I've used a dictionary, and this I think could be a major trap for the unwary.

The German language is as rich and full of nuance as English but our dictionaries and language packs will only give us the basics, and my experience so far in trying to communicate with German speakers via email is that spoken German (which must include forum/email German because they are less formal) is not the same is formal written German. Slang pops up, regional differences appear etc. So to cap off this tirade, the supermarket websites use words that would mislead the average English speaker who relies on a dictionary.

Angebot, Angeboten - both mean flyer, mailer, pricelist, printed specials etc
Wochenangeboten, Aktuelle Angebote - this week's pricelist
Angebote Folgewoche - next week's pricelist
PLZ - German postcode (made up of 5 digits)
Sortiment - product range, brands in stock
Billiger - cheap, discounted
Markt-Finder, Marktsuche - store locator, you will need a German postcode.

Hello everyone, let me thank all my regular site visitors for their continued support over the last year, today actually marks the one year anniversary of this blog and I wouldn't have had the motivation to keep going if you hadn't subscribed to my feed, made lots a great comments about my entries, supported my template experiments, and generally made me feel like I'm part of something that has a future.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the direction of this blog, a one year anniversary kinda does that, and the conclusion I've reached is that this blog is now ready for some changes. Ceejay and I are making good progress towards our plan of become global travellers which is really exciting and also a little daunting.

So our future, and the future of this blog is assured, we've decided that we are now ready to expand this blog in directions we never expected to take it. Over the next few months we plan to index all our tutorials and add more. A long time ago someone suggested I should write a book about Serendipity. Well, I really thought about it, and in the end I've decided that actually is a great idea, but with a twist. I'm going to write out a bunch of tutorials that will collectively become a book, but it will be made freely available to Serendipity users to download. Over the next few days I'll expand on this a bit more, but I need comments and feedback from Serendipity users so we can start the ball rolling. I am also considering donating the copyright of this to the Serendipity developers, but I guess we need to get the project off the ground first.

Many Serendipity users have approached me over the last few months to help them manage their blogs by setting up their database for them, or configuring plugins, customising templates etc. I'm happy to say that I'll be doing all of this, and I'm considering offering a very affordable hosting solution for Serendipity blogs as well. I haven't fully developed the idea but if I get enough interest then I'll make another announcement next month.

Now that I am fully retired, I'm going to develop a second book which has nothing to do with Serendipity. For many years now I've been a mentor to small business owners, a counsellor, and a motivator. I'll be putting together my thoughts into a book that I plan to publish in the next couple of years. Part of my blog will focus on sharing some of these concepts with site visitors. Probably my categories and tags will need to change again, and I'll be working on a new template for this site to showcase some of Serendipity's great features.

So, once again, thanks to everyone who has helped grow this blog so much, especially Matthias who translated the bulk of the tutorials, and if you have suggestions for improvements, opportunities, or if you would like to contribute ideas or tutorials of your own, please comment or send me an email from my contact form.

Carl and Ceejay

Over the last couple of days I've had the great pleasure of experimenting with version 1.8 of the contact form plugin for Serendipity, which has been recently updated by Matthew Groeninger to include the ability to alter the default textboxes by simply checking a box 'Use the Dynamic .tpl?', and then entering your chosen fields into a text box, clicking save, and voila, your site instantly displays your new fields.

What I love about this is that users of Serendipity no longer need to edit the actual php file to get the result they want. Specifically, small business users are now able to change the contact form so that their form includes input boxes for phone numbers, addresses, gender, even checkboxes to subscribe to a mailing list.

The following snippets can be used to configure the new dynamic contact form, all you need to do is copy and paste them directly into the 'form field string' text box. The lower case (r) means that these are required fields. Enjoy!

Basic contact form with first name (r), last name (r), email (r), homepage, and message.
require;First Name;text :require;Surname;text :require;Email;text :Homepage;text :Message;textarea;

Ideally suited for a small business or entrepreneur where the site visitor simply wants to make contact. They are asked for first name (r), last name (r), company, telephone number (r), email (r), homepage and message.
require;First Name;text :require;Surname;text :Company;text :require;Tel;text :require;Email;text :Homepage;text :Message;textarea;

This one might be more useful for generating sales leads where the client needs a followup phone call to set an appointment, and includes first name (r), last name (r), gender being Mr, Mrs or Miss, company, telephone number (r), mobile (r), email (r), homepage, and message.
require;First Name ;text:require;Surname;text :Title;radio;Mr,Mr|Mrs,Mrs|Miss,Miss :Company;text :require;Tel;text :Mobile;text :require;Email;text :Homepage;text :Message;textarea;

I hope these help, good luck.

In a previous entry I demonstrated how to add a quicksearch form to any Serendipity template, and we added a 'Go' Button to make the form look more attractive. In this entry I'm going to create a quicksearch form that includes an image for the button instead of text, and we're going to update the form to be compatible with the LiveSearch plugin.

To begin, we need to add the html form to our template.

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="{$serendipityBaseURL}">
<input type="text" id="serendipityQuickSearchTermField" name="serendipity[searchTerm]" size="15"
value="{$CONST.QUICKSEARCH}..." onfocus="if(this.value=='{$CONST.QUICKSEARCH}...')value=''" onblur="if(this.value=='')value='{$CONST.QUICKSEARCH}...';" />
<input type="hidden" name="serendipity[action]" value="search" />
<input id="submit" type="submit" name="submit" value=" " />
</form>
<div id="LSResult" style="display: none;"><div id="LSShadow"></div></div>
<script type="text/javascript">lsbase = "{$serendipityBaseURL}plugin/ls?";
waittext = "Wait, sending request...";
addLoadEvent(liveSearchInit);
</script>

This code doesn't actually include a reference to the image for our search button, we're going to add that to our stylesheet as a background image for the input id #submit. Notice that the value attribute for the submit button is blank, this simply prevents any text from displaying over the top of the button. I chose to use this technique instead of an actual button tag because I plan to continue to develop the search form snippet.

Also, be aware of one issue with this form, it includes the javascript onFocus and onBlur so that if a user clicks into the form the 'Quicksearch...' text is removed, and if they click back out, the 'Quicksearch...' text returns. This conflicts with the LiveSearch plugin.

What happens is that if the user enters a search query the LiveSearch plugin is activated and displays the list of matching entries. If the user chooses not to click any of the search results, the 'Quicksearch...' text will not return, this is beacuse the LiveSearch plugin code is still in control of the input box and I haven't found any way of getting the LiveSearch javascript to return control to the inline javascript. I'm definitely not a javascript expert. In fact the LiveSearch plugin doesn't release the input box in under normal use so this problem doesn't only affect my snippet, it affects all LiveSearch queries, even those on some other Blog engines. Read More

We spent a couple of hours yesterday going through an old German language book, mostly just reading the first 3 exercises. It starts by describing Miesbach, ein Dorf in Deutschland, which has a church, a tree, a street, and a car. Very easy stuff but a real challenge for someone who can't get her tongue around German pronunciation. She's really struggled with the ei and ie sounds, repeatedly swapping them as in English. I think we finally got that one sorted, and I'm really proud of her efforts to correctly pronounce the ch sound, she's now more or less doing it correctly all the time. The other two chapters were a description of a painting of a yacht in the North Sea, and the story of young Liesl and her family.

Very basic stuff. I can happily report that we were both able to read the stories with a good degree of correct pronunciation, and she even understood the gist of them. Words that really confuse her at the moment are auch, segelt, schon and schön, kein and klein, and of course we're both really struggling with getting our head around when to use die, der and das. But at least we know that die and der correspond to female and male, but how do you know if something is male, female or neuter? I mean when you're talking about a tree or a street these things are objects, not people. Anyway, we understand that German will require time and patience to learn, and I guess like Italian and Spanish which also have gender and neuter we'll just have to practice, practice, and practice. If any German speakers have any simple rules that work in the majority of cases that would be awesome.

Other things that confuse us, the difference between traurig and entshuldugung, which do we use, and in what context, the phrase books don't explain. Both books define them as 'sorry' or 'apology'. In English these words mean the same thing but are used in different contexts, 'I apologised to..' or 'sorry I hurt your feelings...'

EDIT: After several months living in Germany, we now know that traurig is much less common, in fact it seems to be used to express sadness, whereas entshuldugung is used in much the same way as we would say excuse me, and if ou actually want to say sorry about something, you would say 'Es tut mir leid', or often shortened to just 'tut mir leid'.

A few days ago I finally got round to releasing the andreas09 template for Serendipity. Its been added to Spartacus for anyone who wants to try it out. Andreas09 is one of the most attractive designs produced by Andreas Viklund, a good friend who's been really supportive of my ports of his templates. This is one of those templates you see scattered all over the web because it has such universal appeal. Small business users will love it. The Serendipity version includes all of Andreas' original colorsets, and I'm sharing the credit for this one with Bex whose Bex02 template formed the base code.

On another note, I'm really pleased to provide a link to comopti.com, a website owned by Peter Spörrer who requested some custom work from me a while ago and whose site now looks like it has gone live. Looking at Peter's site you might be forgiven for thinking his site is a regular HTML site, but in fact is created using Serendipity, the Static pages plugin, and a customised contact form.

Do you remember the Hemingway template I worked on a while back? It seems Hippo from the Serendipity forums liked the code so much he's heavily customised the template for his own 'Go-Hip' blog. I'm really impressed with what he's done, now if only I can convince him to do up some artwork for me . Watch his space, I'm sure great things are going to happen there sooner or later.

Finally, before I wrap up, Matthias was working on some code which is added to his latest template, YAML, that allows users to automagically configure the number of navbar links to display on their Serendipity template. I have been so impressed with this code that I've updated andreas09, andreas06, andreas08, 1024px, be nice, ceejay01, soccer2006, and softened cells to incorporate his code. This is probably one of the most welcome additions to templating for a long time and if you haven't tried it, go ahead and download one of the above mentioned templates and see for yourself how easy it is to use.

So when you start to learn a new language getting your mouth and tongue to actually produce some sounds can be a challenge. I have the advantage, I learned Afrikaans from a very early age so the German 'ch' sound is easy for me to pronounce, sure its softer than the Dutch 'ge' but the shape of the mouth is vary similar, just less harsh, in fact I think the German sound is more pleasing. The other half never had my advantage, in fact I think the only German word she ever heard was 'scheizhausen' ( I may have spelled that incorrectly), and its not one of those words that naturally lends itself to everyday conversation. It also doesn't have the 'ch' sound in it. So listening to her, she alternates between pronouncing 'ik', 'urghh', 'itch', and just can't seem to get the 'ch'. I'm sure most German students would have this problem.

Despite the obvious setback of pronunciation, German is actually quite an easy language to learn, many of the words are very similar to their English equivalent and this really helps for someone like her. She has even managed to hold a conversation with a German speaking relative. Well, conversation probably isn't the word, but she was understood and better yet, she understood the responses, but the conversation kinda stopped after that, but its an important first step don't you think?

Actually we've had a few laughs with the phrasebooks, we bought a Lonely Planet German phrasebook, and check out these phrases everyone should know;

pg 65 at the hairdresser 'Ich hätte Sie nie an mein Haar lassen dürfen', which apparently means, 'I should never have let you near me'
pg 93 occupations 'Ich bin ein Drag Queen', 'I am a drag queen'
pg 110 going out 'Ich bin high, 'I'm high'
pg 111 romance 'Er ist ein depp, 'He's a prick' or how about this, 'Sie lässt nichts anbrennen', 'She gets around'

We've been in hysterics going through these and imagining all sorts of scenarios where we can use them!

EDIT: The BBC reports on a German mountain (Brocken) that symbolizes German unity. That's interesting, but what really caught my eye was the value of property in the some parts of the East. Could we really buy a house for €10,000? If so, can anyone point to a website where we can see these properties listed?

This is true, I'm not making it up, we've decided to learn German.

Regular readers to this site will know that ceejay and I started our adventure with foreign languages with Italian. Its such a great language, and we're really enjoying trying to learn it, then as we started thinking about where we want to travel, and perhaps where we might want to eventually settle, we thought we really need to learn Spanish.

Our plan then was to visit Argentina, check out the street Tango classes, and enrol in an immersion course. The idea eventually being to buy some acreage in either Spain or one of the more secure South/Central American countries.

Oops, that's all up in the air now. You see her family originates in Germany. Can you see where this is going... So after many years of trying to track down relatives in Germany, she's finally made contact, and now we have to frantically drop Italian and Spanish, and learn German. I thought everybody in the former West Germany speaks English, but not in her family, and this is important to her, so my rusty old German schoolbooks have been dragged out of their mouldy hiding places, the babelfish translator is permanently bookmarked, and we've rushed out to buy phrasebook packs with CD's so we can hear how to pronounce words.

I guess that ultimately this means we might end up settling in Germany, probably in North Rhine and Westphalia, which is a place we know nothing about except that its a heavily industrialised area. Does it even have any of those cute little villages with the big clock and old-fashioned wooden houses like you see in the travel books. What type of food do they eat, will we fit in?