Translate Website Content into a Different Language

The world wide web has made interacting with other cultures so much easier. Even so, many websites are in languages that I don’t speak. And I know that English isn’t the first language of many people who visit my sites. But there is help. Babel Fish from Yahoo can translate a bit of text or an entire web page for you.

If you’re on a website written in a language you don’t know, you can visit Babel Fish and type in the URL of the page you want to translate and the ‘from’ and ‘to’ language. Here is a screen shot of Better Living On the Web from English to French.

Better Living On the Web Translated into French

If you own a website and would like to make it easy for people to translate it into their native language, you can add the Babel Fish translation service to your site. You can test it using the one here at Better Living on the Web (scroll down the right side navigation to find it).

The translation may not be perfect, but hopefully it will be enough to get the meaning of the website.

Search All Cities on Craigslist Through Google

Craigslist can be an excellent resources for finding everything from apartments to jobs . The hassle is that you can’t search every city on Craigslist at once. It makes the job really tedious. Crazedlist.org is a site that will search multiple cities but you have disable referrers in your web browser so Craiglist won’t know you’re coming from Crazedlist and block your results.

So the best option is to use Google search. Over at Wired.com they posted an article on how to use Google’s advanced search to find what you’re looking for on all Craiglist’s city pages. Its worth a read!

To search on Craiglist through Google Search:

1) Visit Google.com and click on Advanced Search next to the search box.

2) Type in your search term (s) into the box marked Find Pages that Have All These Words

3) Type in “directory”* into the box that is marked But don’t show pages that that have…

4) Type in “Craigslist.org”* into the box that says Search within a site or domain

*When typing your search terms or domain, you don’t need the quotes.

Another option is to simply copy and paste the following into the Google.com search box with your search term in place of the words “your search term”:

your search term -directory site:craigslist.org

(Example: telecommute -directory site:craigslist.org)

Google Results of Telecommuting Job Search on Craiglist.org

Grocery Shopping Made Easier

It is possible to much of your grocery shopping online. But if you don’t live in a delivery area for one of the grocery stores that deliver, you still need to go to the market to get fresh items.

I hate grocery shopping. The very worst part is the unloading and putting the items away. But I also don’t like the actual shopping. I can’t find thing I need and almost always forget something.

Dave Cheong had a similar problem and he found a way to fix it. He created at the grocery shopping helper which is an online program that can help you organize your shopping trip by providing you with a list of all the items you buy sorted by the isles they are found in. No more back tracking or hunting. Simply take the list, mark the items you want to buy, and head straight to the store and isle.

You do need to do a little leg work before using the program by creating the list of items and visiting the store to find out what isle they are in. But once done, it could save you loads of time in the grocery store.

Check out the Grocery Shopping Helper here.