I don’t know if anyone noticed one of the new features that I’ve added to Tricia’s Musings and As the Garden Grows yet, but both sites are now using the Google Translate plugin.

I decided to add this feature because I know that both sites have quite a few readers who’s first language is not English. I, of course, don’t speak most of the languages that my posts can now easily be translated into, so I’m not sure how beneficial translating my articles will be in the long run.

It’s worth a try anyway.

I know that translators work best when the author uses proper syntax, grammar and spelling. I try. I know my grammar isn’t perfect, but I do make an effort.

The Google Translator plugin can translate a site or posts into the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Chinese languages. I wish there were also a Nordic language feature.

As I’ve mentioned many times over the last few months this site will soon have a new look. It will happen soon!

None of my husband or I’s blogs currently use widgets. That’s about to change. I haven’t been using widgets because many of the codes that I use in my sidebars just didn’t work well in Widgets. I’ve known about a plugin called PHP-Exec for a while now, but it’s never seemed to work well for me.

I’ve recently discovered a similarly named WordPress Plugin called Exec-PHP and it works! Even better – it’s easier to use than the other plugin. You don’t have to wrap PHP code in another code. You just activate the plugin and tada you can use PHP code in your posts (in code mode) or in your widgets.

I stayed up quite late last night working on widgetizing my gardening blog on a test blog site. It was necessary to use the Exec-PHP plugin in order to use widgets on that site. Later this evening I’ll work on transferring the contents of my test widgets over to my gardening blog and it will officially be the first blog of ours that is fully widgetized.

I’m sure I’ll move quickly and use widgets for all of our blogs sidebars.

The great thing about using widgets on your wordpress site is that if you want to change your theme you can do so very easily as long as you pick a theme that is widget ready as your sidebar widgets should transfer over to the new theme quite nicely.

This theme is not widget ready at all. In fact the code used to make up the sidebars is very outdated coding indeed. It uses tables instead of unordered lists. Tables … that’s partly why this site takes a little longer to load than it should! So yes, a theme change is necessary.

So watch for the changes in our blogs and in the meantime if those of you who speak one of the languages that this site can now be translated in can give the translator a try I’d appreciate it. I’d love to know if the translations make sense! The translator buttons are located in the top left sidebar.