Posts

The first step in building the dictionary is data design. I will be using Postgress as a SQL relational database, and using PgAdmin to assist in the design of the tables and their relationships. Building the Database My choice for core technology underpinning the data of the website will be a relational database. Due to the relational nature of language data, especially for my features which will include words in-situ, as well as translations from english to sourashtra and vice-versa, a database is perfectly suited to the task. Moreover, there are database utilities that will allow for search and even fuzzy matching, so stay tuned for that later! ...

This post is Part 1 of my series on building a dictionary website for the Sourashtra Language. Photograph by Poras Chaudhary, The New York Times/Redux Project Background This is my first post on the dictionary website project, where I am building a site for translations and dictionary for the Sourashtra language. I am currently studying the language to better communicate with my in-laws after marrying into the community. Sourashtra is an endangered language with less than one million speakers. It is spoken primarily in Madurai, though speakers of the language reside in many cities in Tamil Nadu. The goal of this website is to provide a way for people to learn the language through translations of common words, example sentences and their english translations, and in the future, an audio player to learn pronunciations. ...

Everyone developer has their secret sauce for making their environment as comfortable and ergonomic as possible. Over time you will figure out which commands just click for you and you can map these to easy keyboard shortcuts. Over my 8 years as a developer, here are some of the commands I’ve built up over the years to make editing text, moving windows, navigating the editor, and running commands a breeze in VS Code. ...

I love Vim. I seriously do. So much so, in fact, that going back to regular text editing on coworker’s machines feels like I am 50% as productive otherwise. What makes Vim so effective? The answer is natural keybindings for the most common tasks while writing text. You can use it for writing any text, whether it be code, config files, markdown files, or any plain text you’re working on. When you first start out, it will be awkward. There’s no getting around that. However, once you’ve built up the muscle memory after a couple of days, using Vim will feel like second nature. ...

Step 1: Setting Up Hugo Why hugo? I decided to choose a static site generator that was fast, easy to use, and had a lot of support. Now it was time to setup the environment. I am using WSL2 with Ubuntu, so the instructions will follow for that. Installing hugo and setting up the site First, get hugo for ubuntu. $ sudo apt install hugo Next, I setup the project directory and generated the skeleton using hugo: ...