Shameless plug from Kellen and me, with apologies to those of you for whom this is old news…
Phonemica is raising funds through an Indiegogo campaign that runs through June 9. Contributions will cover some new hardware, hosting, and other costs for the coming year. Greatly appreciated to get your help:
1. Financially, if you can swing it
and/or
2. Helping us spread the word
Read more about it on the Phonemica blog.
Singapore. Haven’t been there myself, but I’ve heard good things. So we’re taking our virtual offices there. A server move, that is.
It’s all starting tomorrow (Mar 20) afternoon, so if suddenly you find you can’t access your must-know up-to-the-minute news on language in China, rest assured that the internetz will catch up with our new IP address in a day or two and all should be well (wave joss sticks).
Why a new IP? Well, let’s just say that nanny seems to have found someone naughty playing at our current IP, and nanny believes in group punishment. Thus accessing Sinoglot & Phonemica on the mainland over the last week has been painful to impossible. If you want to know details, I’m happy to discuss offline. I appreciate the other bloggers who’ve offered advice about the situation over the last few days and I’m happy to share my experience if it’ll help someone else.
Just a heads-up that there is a new Nishan Shaman installment out over at Echoes of Manchu. If you’re new to the story or want to refresh your memory, there is a page listing all of the installments here.
Kellen and I are very excited to announce, first to our Sinoglot friends, the beta launch of an entirely new project* that we hope will be a rich source of scholarship, activity, and (geeky) entertainment for years to come.
Phonemica (乡音苑, xiāngyīnyuàn), to quote the tagline, is “a panorama of Chinese, painted by its speakers through their stories.” In less poetic terms, the website is a group-sourced collection of carefully transcribed, high-quality recordings of both Standard Mandarin (putonghua) and local varieties of Chinese. Continue…
For the 1% of readers who actually visit the Sinoglot website, as opposed to you lazy Google reader bastards our valued RSS users.
You might recall that after a break-in several months ago, we decided to move SG headquarters to a more hopeful neighborhood*.
Problem was, in our haste, we left some things behind at the old place, such as email subscriptions. No problem, right? We’ll just have folks resubscribe, as soon as they notice something missing in their life. Great solution, except for the minor issue of having no working email subscription system.
We fought valiantly with the WordPress theme about getting the subscription box to show up, to no avail. So for now, it’s out with the old WordPress theme, and in with, well, the most unimaginative theme available. Yes, thememaster Kellen is going to kill me, but there you go.
However, email subscriptions are up and running again. Just put your address in the box on the top right of the home page and enjoy months of low-cost subscription goodness.
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*WebFaction is the name of our hosting service. So far so good, with appropriate incantations against webhosting’s evil spirits.
As Kellen mentioned, we’ve been cleaning up the Sinoglot servers since our friends, the script hackers, visited.
We are now at a new hosting service and have sterilized every garment that we brought over. You may notice that some garments haven’t quite made it yet: broken links, no more email subscriptions, etc. Apologies. We’re working on it. In the meantime, if you notice something missing, let us know.
Now it’s back to our eclectic, sporadic posting.
John Pasden of Sinosplice has a Shanghai-based company called AllSet Learning that focuses on helping foreigners learn Chinese. He discovered that since people have different learning needs, especially when it comes to learning grammar, it would be a good idea to have an overall framework available to learners. Since the only things that presently exist like this are textbooks, and there is nothing really like this on the web, he decided to make an online source.
And since the best kinds of online sources are those that keep up to date and can be corrected, he made it a wiki.
And since he’s an open-source kind of guy, interested in making things that are beneficial to all, he put it under a Creative Commons license. Check it out here. Continue…