اردوویب بلاگ

On Blogger You can start blogging in Urdu with in minutes. In this tutorial we will teach you how to make a bilingual blog on Blogger where you can write easily in both English and Urdu.

Lets first check the required software to do that:

1. Can you write Urdu on your computer? Windows 2000 and win XP come with Urdu support. All you need to do is to install Urdu support and to do that you can always visit this microsoft website and follow the instructions there. Mac also has Urdu support available and just in case if you are unable to install Urdu on your machine then you can always download Unipad which is unicode text editor and enables you to write Urdu. The free version of this software allows you to write atleast 1000 characters for more you have to buy it.

2. Internet explorer 5.5 or above or Mozilla Firefox. It is highly recommended that you download and use Firefox which is the best browser available right now.

Now go to blogger.com, if you already have an account you can use it but if you don’t have an account then you can always create one. After getting an account on bloggers you will provide information about your blog on the next page. Provide a title and an address for your blog. You can have an Urdu title like we did, we named our example blog “ببلو کا بلاگ” and babloooo2 as our blogspot address. You can change the title of your blog later. Click on continue …

The next step is important. Here you will be asked to choose a template for your blog. To write this tutorial I checked different templates available at blogger and I found that all the templates designed by Jeffery Zeldman use Tahoma as the main font. Tahoma is the font we can use for writing Urdu on the web. Al though there are some other choices like “Nafees Web Naskh” but in this tutorial we assume that you don’t want to go through editing CSS and templates. On this page you choose any template offered by mr. Zeldman. My favorites are Mr. Motto and Son of Motto, if you don’t find these templates you can pick any of Zeldmans creative peices and even if you dont find any of Zeldman’s template then pick any we will fix them later. Press continue and your blog is ready now proceed to the posting screen.

This screen is the place where you will add a new post to your blog. This posting area has two interfaces. One is famous WSIWYG/Compose mode and the other is HTML mode. The compose mode editor is a fine text editor just like Microsoft word. You can press tiny buttons to make your text bold, italic or align your text to right, left etc. Now if you are able to write Urdu on your machine then it would be better that you write your post in notepad and paste it here. Then select your Urdu text and press the little Align right button (see picture 1). Now press the publish button and once publishing is done click to view your blog in new window. Have a look at how your blog appears and look at the Urdu text is it clean and readable? You can also look at our test blog and compare. If you didnt use a Jeffery Zeldman template and now Urdu text doesn’t appear right then there are two things you can do about it.

1. You can use the Zeldman template used at babloo’s blog.
2. You can change the Urdu text on your blog with out making any changes in your template.

The template on babloo’s blog is here. Now go to your blog’s Template section and delete every thing between <style type="text/css"> and tags. Now switch back to babloo’s template, select all, copy and paste between these two tags on your blog. Save your template and then republish your index. Check your blog now.

If you want to use your own template and just want to change the font in Urdu then do this. Select your Urdu text, align it to right and then change font to any font for example arial. Now go to HTML mode and replace Arial with Tahoma or ‘Nafees Web Naskh’ or both in order of your preferences. This technique is also useful for those who want to use different fonts or want to change size of their text.

The purpose of this tutorial is to quickly make a bi lingual blog on Blogger. We have ignored several other things here but we will talk about them later. If you start blogging in Urdu after reading this tutorial then please inform us about your blog and if you fail to do so please leave your blog address and your questions in comments.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2005 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Blogger, English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.