Senlin Online

California Wine Partners, LLC

Piet — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:43:07 +0000

For one of their clients California Wine Partners needed the multilingual website to be online within the next 18 hours.
Senlin Online did an assessment and discovered that not only was the theme not internationalized, the developer that was previously hired to do the site made quite a mess of it by using Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified Chinese and worst of all machine translations.
The current developer had been working round the clock to repair all the damage, but certain things just didn’t work, seem to be lost and what not.
Fortunately we could recover most of it by adjusting the WPML settings and tweaking some of the code here and there.
Although developer and client have decided to wait a bit for the theme to become internationalized, at least they can run the site content now already multilingual.

Illuminant Partners

Piet — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:35:30 +0000

Early February 2012 Illuminant Partners hired us because they needed some help with installing WPML on a site of one of their clients. We also gave some consultation on how to best implement some changes in the theme they used to develop their client’s website on, in order to optimalize the site for the English as well as the Mandarin Chinese content.

Grafik Design Mallorca

Piet — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:41:32 +0000

In October and November 2011 we assisted Grafik Design Mallorca with Consulting and Coding WPML for a site they were developing for one of their clients. Languages: Spanish, English, German.

In February 2012 Grafik Design Mallorca hired us again to implement a custom language switcher on a website of another client. Languages: Spanish, Catalan, German, English, French.

Hoo Logic

Piet — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:34:39 +0000

Hoo Logic approached us in January for some advice on one of their projects.
As Hoo Logic operates from Kyoto, Japan, we assisted them with a consultation via Skype so they can make a well informed decision on what the best way is to implement a Spanish section on the mostly English website of their client.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Piet — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:05:08 +0000

Senlin Online wishes you a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

Chinese New Year starts with the New Moon on the first day of the new year and ends on the full moon 15 days later. The 15th day of the new year is called the Lantern Festival, which is celebrated at night with lantern displays and children carrying lanterns in a parade. The Chinese calendar is based on a combination of lunar and solar movements. The lunar cycle is about 29.5 days. In order to “catch up” with the solar calendar the Chinese insert an extra month once every few years (seven years out of a 19-yearcycle). This is the same as adding an extra day on leap year. This is why, according to the solar calendar, the Chinese New Year falls on a different date each year. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are celebrated as a family affair, a time of reunion and thanksgiving. The celebration was traditionally highlighted with a religious ceremony given in honor of Heaven and Earth, the gods of the household and the family ancestors. The sacrifice to the ancestors, the most vital of all the rituals, united the living members with those who had passed away. Departed relatives are remembered with great respect because they were responsible for laying the foundations for the fortune and glory of the family.

The Chinese New Year of 2012 will be the Year of the Dragon. Expect this to be a very energetic year, filled with optimism, power and entrepreneurship. However, the year is of water dragon, which means that even the most powerful will give a patient hearing to the weaker, and will try to see through their point of view. Better alliances and decision will take places.

[Source: http://www.theholidayspot.com/chinese_new_year/]

Separate page for completed WPML Projects

Piet — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:31:50 +0000

Since today we have added another page on the Senlin Online website: WPML Projects.

In case you do not know yet, WPML stands for WordPress Multi Lingual and is a plugin dedicated to give WordPress website multilingual functionality. One of the specialties of Senlin Online is to implement WPML into websites.

This page actually is part of our Portfolio and it contains a summary of most of the specific WPML Projects we have done for clients.

In most cases it contains a link to that specific client Project as well as a a short paragraph on the project details.

We hope this is useful for you in your decision to hire Senlin Online for your next project, whether it is WPML-specific or more generally a new website or website renewal.

Sreyka Smile Association

Piet — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 06:57:53 +0000

The NGO Sreyka Smile Association approached Senlin Online in January 2012 to assist them with solving some problems they were experiencing with WPML. The main problem was that the homepage was not working properly in the second language (English). After doing a quick assessment, it turned out that the theme was not internationalized, so we fixed that first. Then to get everything working properly we tweaked some settings here and there and by the time the client’s new day started there was a functional bilingual (French/English) website. Impressed by the speed the client then asked Senlin Online also to take care of moving and customizing the language switcher and make more features of the site (such as the Alert Box) functional in the bilingual environment.

On the testimonials page you can read what the client had to say about our services.

Decho Limited

Piet — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:11:29 +0000

For Decho we did some consulting regarding a project of one of their clients.

science communications

Piet — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:07:30 +0000

Early January we completed customization work on the bilingual website of science communications.
The work Senlin Online did for this Swiss project was consultation and customization of the language switcher (to show the site in the English or the German language) among other programming work.

Exchange Rates

Piet — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:36:43 +0000

When I first came to China, back in 1998, the official exchange rate between the Netherlands Guilder (NLG) (the Euro came later) and the CNY was something like 1:4. The exchange rate with the USD was around 1:8 and at that time the exchange rate between the NLG and the USD was 1:2.

Since those days the markets have seen lots of fluctuations and currently it seems an era has started where the EUR and the USD keep losing ground against the CNY.

It actually is getting so bad that I have decided that from now on I will no longer quote my prices in EUR or USD, but instead in CNY. I have done this to protect myself from dropping rates of currencies, because after all I am living in Beijing, China and we pay here with CNY.

Thanks for your understanding and please use the comments section to let me know any questions you might have.