Category — Malayalam

Welcome to the first guest post on this blog. This post was written by pR@tz , from “ A World of My Own” . He has a Malayalam blog too. pR@tz is a MS Scholar at IIT Madras. Welcome and thanks pR@tz !!

How to read Malayalam on your computer

The Malayalam computing gained popularity with the evolution of UNICODE. Swathanthra Malayalam Computing is one of the independent organizations, actively working for the development of softwares and fonts for Malayalam computing. Before the UNICODE, it was the ASCII fonts, which were used to display Malayalam characters and is still (unfortunately) used by websites like Malayala Manorama, Kerala Kaumudi, Deshabhimani, and puzha.com.

The disadvantages of ASCII font

(1) You need to install separate fonts for different sites.

(2) Its not PURE Malayalam font, but like putting Malayalam mask over Latin characters.

(3) Searching, indexing and other Malayalam computing options are not possible with ASCII fonts.

Try copy pasting Malayalam text from the above mentioned ASCII sites and try the same from Mathrubhumi site (which is using UNICODE ) and you will understand the difference. Also try Googling with the text you copied from Mathrubhumi.

Now, let see how to make your computer Malayalam-literate,

[Read more →]

I have started blogging in Malayalam too !!

I find reading Malayalam blogs more interesting than actually writing blogs in Malayalam…. may be because I am not used to writing Malayalam online using the transliteration and similar stuff, where we write words using English letters which will be changed to the desired language automatically.

When I started reading Malayalam blogs, I found that most of them use Blogger.com since they have the transliteration feature, a feature which makes blogging in Indic languages really easy. Why don’t they just use Wordpress.org or Wordpress.com ? We really need more people start using Wordpress, to blog in Indic languages. Don’t you think so ?

Initially I started with Blogger itself, and then started copying the content to Wordpress and it worked perfect. Just that I typed everything using Blogger.com and then published it using Wordpress.org blog on this domain itself. ( sssh … secret .. I have another installation of Wordpress on this domain where I play with themes and now Malayalam Blogging )

If you install certain softwares, which enables transliteration on your computer, you can directly blog in Indic languages, using Wordpress platform. So I installed “Keyman” and started writing to Wordpress blog directly, in Malayalam.

[Read more →]

I know I don’t have enough experience in Malayalam blogging to actually get in to writing a review about it. These are my random thoughts on writing in Malayalam or few notes on what I am doing there.

(1) I am still trying to learn to type in good Manglish that Blogger will understand, in order to transliterate it in to Malayalam words.

(2) I do not know how Google will index blogs in Mayalam or any language other than English. I am still at zero on SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) in Indic languages including Malayalam.

(3) 99% of Malayalam blogs are on blogger.com ( or blogspot ) and there are only very few people who actually try it with Wordpress.com or wordpress.org

(4) There is a good community of Malayalam bloggers.

(5) There is lot of serious blogging happening. They are discussing politics,history,international issues,poetry,culture.. and lot of serious topics.

(6) Malayalam blogging community is trying everything possible to get more people in to Malayalam blogging.

(7) Most of the Malayalam blogs are 100% in Malayalam.

(8) I am yet to see someone who is trying to make money through blogging.

(9) I need to personally ask Malayalam bloggers if they are satisfied with what they get on Blogger.com

(10) I will try to bring them to Wordpress.