If you are like me and use regularly many online services (few gmail accounts, Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, google agenda, google docs, drop box, Evernote, delicious, campfire, etc.), you have a lot of data spread in the Cloud. Some times I don’t remember where is stored a specific data. For example, you search an old message with a good idea inside but you don’t remember if it was an email, a message on Facebook or Linkedin ? All  those online services are independent and you have to sign-in each one until you find the information. Thanks to Greplin, this is over ! It’s a search engine which index only your personal data hosted online. You can use it to make quick search like Google.

First you have to sign-up, then you will give access to the services you want to index. Most of them are free of charge, some are unlockable with an “invite friend” feature, and the last one are available only if you pay the Premium upgrade ($4.99/month).

Greplin supported services

Greplin will index your data and then you will be able to search by using the web interface or an iPhone application or a Chrome extension.

Greplin web GUI

Greplin iPhone app

Greplin has really change the way I use Cloud services. I regret the service is only in English and I hope there will be more services. If you want you can give your voice for your prefered services by voting on this page of the Greplin’s support.

Tell me what you think about Greplin in the comments.

PS : to give you transparency, the link used to reach Greplin on this post have an invitation tag. It allows to unlock one of the services for the visitor who click the link and for me.

I won’t give some deep details or technical stuff because SEO is a real job which need some theory and a lot of experiences. You will find below the concepts you should know.

Search engines don’t index site but pages. It sounds trivial but it’s very important. It means having a strategy just at the beginning (like submit a sitemap, check pages titles format, or optimize header of the pages) is not enough. If SEO is important for your site, you have to think about it each time you add a new content.

As said before, the most important SEO parameter is the content of the site. It’s your major asset to have a good ranking in search engine results. I give bellow some SEO experts tricks:

• Permalink structure have to be like ”/%postnames%/” or  ”/%category%/%postnames%/“. Others formats are useless since they don’t add any information and they make your URL longer.
• The slug (URL variable part) have to be not too long and avoid stop words (a, one, for, with etc.)
• The main keywords of your page have to be in the URL, in the title and in the first lines of the post.
• The first words of your post will be used by search engines in the result pages. Your first words should make reader visit your website. You can specify the text to use by search engine by adding a meta tag (see plugin below)

A good way to optimize your ranking is to have a thematic page with links to your most interesting or popular pages. This type of page should have a good ranking in the search engines results.

Avoid duplicated content. It is possible that your content is accessible thru different URL or some pages of your website have the same couple title/description. Search engines don’t like it. The main cause for blog is archives. With WordPress for example there are time, categories, tags and authors archives. The risk that the content of the blog is duplicated is very high. There are solutions: meta tag can help you. I let you search the web to have more information on this subject.

The site speed is important for visitors pleasure and for search engines ranking. Two ways to improve your site speed:

•  Use plugins as little as possible. Of course they can help you much but they can slow your site. Many plugins can be replaced by theme modifications. Now child themes make this update really easy.
• Use a cache plugin. There are many of them. Search on internet to find the one corresponding to your needs.

There are many SEO plugins for WordPress to help you rank your pages in search engines results. For me, WordPres SEO by Yoast is one of the best because it adds a checklist in pages and posts edit view to help you optimize your content for ranking.

The last advice I can give is to read regularly about SEO on internet. Search engines update their algorithm regularly and you have to understand and react to keep a good ranking.

Non-exhaustive reading list accessible for newbies:

• Seomix and Le blog de Florian Karmen (French speaking)
• Yoast and Matt Cutts blog (English speaking)

I hope this initiation will be helpful for beginners. Others reader you can correct or add advises in the comments.

Without automation, the process is long and uninteresting: search the episodes release date on the US TV, search the episodes files on the internet, check the associated comments to check quality and fake, search the subtitles in French and English languages, fetch all this stuff, move and rename files in the dedicated folder and finally launch a “refresh” of the media center. Only after that I can lie on the couch to enjoy my new episode.

So I’ve used my brain, searched on internet, and tested some solutions to succeed in automating all the process.

1 – Find the new episodes: TVShows 2

To fetch automatically new episodes I get an open source software for Mac really simple to use: TVShows 2

TVShows 2 main window

This application is translated in many languages. It allows to subscribe easily to TV shows by choosing in an existing list. It is really easy to set it up to check regularly new episode and launch automatically the download in the dedicated folder (one folder by show).

TVShows 2 settings

Now we have a .torrent file saved in the right place. TVShows will launch the P2P download software by itself. I recommend to use Transmission available for many OS.

Download new episodes: Transmission

Transmission is a good piece of software to download torrents. There are many others. I let you decide which one you want to use. The settings I will describe should be easy to transpose.

The aim is to set up the software to start the download without asking an action to the user and download the video file in the same place where the torrent file is located.

Transmission settings

Now I’ve my episode downloaded on the right place without any action.

 Integrate the episode in Plex: Plex Media Server

I won’t explain how to install Plex here. There will be other posts on this blog about this subject to replace the old deleted tutorials. I will show some settings to make Plex detect automatically your new episodes, fetch metadata and eventually download subtitles.

You have to open the Plex Media Server preferences to make Plex update the library each time it detect a new file.

Plex Media Server Settings

Then, check if theTVDB metadata agent is correctly setup. This agent is internationalized and is able to fetch all the metadata of your preferred TV shows. OpenSubtitles.org secondary metadata agent have to be selected (4).

TheTVDB Metadata Agent Settings

If you don’t have done it already, you can choose the subtitle languages to download from OpenSubtiltes.org. Choose ”Preferences” (5) after selecting “OpenSubtitles.org” (4)

OpenSubtitles metadata agent settings

Congratulation, now your system is set up to download automatically new episodes and integrate them in Plex!

Below I will give you some correlated hints. I encourage you to read the following.

Backup solution for subtitles : Soleol

Sometimes, Plex opensubtitles.org metadata agent doesn’t work. I have a backup plan: Soleol (Free for Mac, Linux and Windows).

SolEol main window

This app finds subtitles on openSubtitles.org with a simple drag and drop on the “Get Subtitles” icon. Then it will fetch automatically subtitles by using the video file signature. If there are many matches, the most popular is selected but you can make your choice if needed. In the case of no match, you will find a link to search on podnapisi.net by using the episode name. After the subtitles downloaded you just have to click on “Update Library” and you subs will be available in Plex.

To setup Soleol you have to open preferences, choose your languages and add your credential (login /password) on  opensubtiles.org.

If you don’t find subtitles after that, you are really unlucky

Enjoy your new episodes: Plex clients

To enjoy your episodes, there are many Plex clients.

Officials:

• for Mac (free and open source)
• for iOS ( 3€99 universal for iPhone and iPad)
• for Androïd (4,99$)
• for Google TV (0,99$ during launching period)
• for Windows (free)
• for Roku (beta version, explanation on the forums.)

Third party clients:

• AppleTV 2 client (jailbreak needed. Explanation on the Wiki and on forums)
• Linux client (alpha version , development in progress on the forums)
• Client for some LG devices (TV, Bluray device , etc. info here and on forums)
• Client for some Samsung devices (info on forums)

You should find a client for your needs and your system.

One more thing: smartphone app

Last hint to be alerted when new episodes are available. I recommend two app for smartphones:

• TVShow Time:  iPhone and Androïd (free now and really gorgeous)
• iSeries (iPhone and Androïd : French speaking, free and link to your betaseries account)

This theme is a quick and dirty hack for my bilingual blog and I think it can be helpful for other people like me who trying to make a multilingual WordPress website. So I’ve decided to share my code on Githhub and encourage you to test it and improve it. The code is commented and section you have to update are clearly identified.

Currently the theme works as below:

• IF the visitor requests  yourwebsite.com/ THEN:
• IF the preferred browser language is French THEN visitor is redirected to yourwebsite.com/fr/.
• ELSE visitor is redirected to yourwebsite.com/en/.
• IF the visitor requests an URL like yourwebsite.com/fr/xxx or yourwebsite.com/en/yyy THEN websites of the WordPress network manage the request.
• IF the visitor requests yourwebsite.com/zzz where zzz doesn’t start with  fr/ or en/ THEN:
• IF a static page exists it’s returned to the visitor.
• ELSE:
• IF the preferred browser language is French THEN the visitor is redirected to yourwebsite.com/fr/erreur404 which displays a 404 error message in french.
• ELSE the visitor is redirected to yourwebsite.com/en/404error which displays a 404 error message in english.

I’ve many ideas to improve the theme and make it more easy to use but I haven’t any time and competency to do that. If this theme is useful for you and you want to improve it, fork my Github repo and send me pull requests.

Source on Github : https://github.com/oncleben31/Multisite-Language-Switcher-Theme

I need two independent sites to facilitate the plugins and theme localization with an easy way to switch between languages if a translation is available. Another reason is to optimize the search engine indexing. With this solution I can have some language specific posts without translation.

Below I explain how I’ve implement that with WordPress: 

1. Setup of the WordPress multisite feature. If you don’t know it, it allow to have many WordPress site with only one installation. Administration is simplified and updates are done only once. To have more information go and read the multisite documentation.
2. I have a root blog (oncleben31.cc/) which is useless (see step n°4), a french blog (oncleben31.cc/fr/) and an english blog (oncleben31.cc/en/). The language is setup in wordpress settings. Benefits: I can have specific plugins or theme for each language if needed.
3. I use the Multisite Language Switcher by lloc plugin to display a link in the side bar to go to the other language (sources hosted on github). This plugin is really useful: it allows to display a link to the other available language and it allows to add a link to the translation of a post or a page if available too. This feature is eased by adding a drop down list in the edit view.
   

   Example of the Multisite Language Switcher plugin when editing a post

4. The last thing is about managing visitor coming directly on  ”http://oncleben31.cc/”. Indeed the root website is a third wordpress blog not in french nor in english. I made a hack to redirect users in function of the preferred language return by the browser. To do that I’ve created the ”Multisite Language Switcher Theme” theme which doesn’t display any content but manage the redirection (theme detailed in this post). To avoid disorientating your visitor this theme manages 404 errors too . You can find the theme’s sources and improve it on Github.

Setting up a multilingual blog is not easy and I’ve search a long time to find the good solution corresponding to my needs. If you have simular needs let’s try this solution and share your experiences in the comments.

For regular visitors or those who have follow a link to come here: I’ve decide to delete the blog and start from scratch another version of oncleben31.cc because of the following reasons:

• The blog wasn’t update since a long time.
• The content mainly about Plex and multilingual WordPress was deprecated.
• The former architecture of the blog was really difficult to maintain.

In few weeks, I will publish new contents about my predilection subjects (Plex and WordPress) and new ones to be discovered. The blog is still bilingual and my aims are still the same.

If you have ideas or comments to share, do it in the comments of this post.