Discussion for Bilara users

Blake’s just starting work this morning and he’ll be refreshing the app. Expect some choppy waters and then smooooooooooth sailing. Hopefully!

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Yay, it’s working again! Thanks so much @Blake! You are the best. :grinning:

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So today I made a significant update to Bilara and it has been running smoothly.

You may have noticed the “green tick” behavior has changed, as in it turns green much faster. The green tick now means the server has received the translation and will definitely not lose it. It doesn’t guarantee that it’ll immediately make it onto GitHub as there can be funny business going on with git.

If your changes do not appear on GitHub, do not try to re-submit them, that is a waste of effort (it won’t do any harm, but it also won’t help). The server will try again later to get the translation to Github after the issue has been resolved. But if there’s no green tick the server probably didn’t receive the translation due to a network issue.

Behind the scenes it’s pretty similar to a journaling file system which protects against data loss (or more specifically against funny business like half-written changes) by recording what changes are going to be made in a journal before actually committing those changes to the files then updating the journal once the changes have been successfully committed, if something bad happens success is never noted and it will try to write the changes again using the journal. Bilara did always keep a log of incoming translations that a couple of times I’ve used to recover from git corruption manually, but the new setup allows much more automatic replaying of the journal.

This system is still brand new and will of course get refined over time to work better, as issues arise. But overall it’s a very promising direction.

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Bhante @sujato there appear to be some <j> tags in some texts in Bilara. What do they mean?

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@Blake, bilara is working supremely well at the moment! May you be well and splendidly happy!

Much metta from Perth,
Ajahn Brahmali

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Hear now the doctrine of the <j> tag!

Verse lines are finicky to typeset. Sometimes a line is just too long and you get something like this.

A brahmin’s so-called because they have banished
          evil,
an ascetic’s so-called since they live a serene life.

Or, worse:

A brahmin’s so-called because they have banished ev-
          il,
an ascetic’s so-called since they live a serene life.

Throw a <j> tag in:

A brahmin’s so-called <j>because they have banished evil,
an ascetic’s so-called <j>since they live a serene life.

And it’ll look like this:

A brahmin’s so-called 
        because they have banished evil,
an ascetic’s so-called 
       since they live a serene life.

The name <j> comes from the technical term “enjambment”, which is when a line of poetry flows on to the next. <j> is a custom HTML element that just does this one thing. The browser will automatically close it and apply styles.

It’ll make the verses lines look nice when appropriate on the web, but its main use is for printing. We convert it to the appropriate LaTeX and make your verses look nice!

  • tl;dr: use a <j> tag when you want to split a long line of verse in a sensible place.

Don’t!

  • Don’t use <j> outside of verse.
  • Don’t use multiple <j> tags in a line.
  • Don’t go overboard, use only when necessary.

Long lines of verse are often a sign of clumsy translation. See if you can rephrase it first.

Obviously this will be more useful for some languages (German) and less for others (Japanese).

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The translators were happy with what Master Sujato said. :pray:

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Hello everyone, Bilara hasn’t been loading for me the last few days. Is it only me?

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Hmm, I don’t know. For me it has always been working normally, even just 30 min ago I committed my last segment. Bhante @sujato, how is it for you?

No, it’s been fine for me. In fact I was just thinking about how it’s been reliable ever since the last round of changes that Blake made.

Let us know if the problem persists.

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Hmm… someone messages a developer to tell them everything is working fine…

That never happens.

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Lol, true words Ven.

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Thank you for you replies. Yes, I am sorry it is still not loading on my side. @carmi, could this be related to rights with my Github account?

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It’s likely we need @blake to answer this.

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Hi @noeismet what do you see in your browser when you try to load Bilara?

Okay, we’re going to need some more details to help you out with this one.

First, let’s get the basics out of the way.

  • Do a hard refresh.
  • Make sure you’re logged in to Bilara.
  • Check your connection: does it work fine on other sites?
    • Bilara takes a long time for the initial load, because we put all the projects on the Home page. This is something we want to improve in future.
  • Make sure you are using an up-to-date browser.
    • (Unfortunately Bilara has only really been tested in Chrome, but other browsers should generally work.)
  • Check your browser addons. Try disabling them all.

If that doesn’t work, then load up Bilara as best you can and send us a screenshot. You can paste it in this thread.

Then check your browser inspector for errors (right click → inspect → console). Take a screenshot of the errors or just copy and paste them.

Also, please share your browser and OS details. :pray:

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Hello @carmi, this is what I see:

It says loading but nothing loads even if I keep the page open for hours.
I am going to follow the steps recommended by @sujato and see if I get something.

Noé

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Hello Bhante,

So I followed all the steps you recommended and the projects in Bilara still do not load unfortunately.

  • Do a hard refresh. :ballot_box_with_check:
  • Make sure you’re logged in to Bilara. :ballot_box_with_check:
  • Check your connection: does it work fine on other sites? :ballot_box_with_check:
    • Bilara takes a long time for the initial load, because we put all the projects on the Home page. This is something we want to improve in future.
  • Make sure you are using an up-to-date browser. :ballot_box_with_check:
    • (Unfortunately Bilara has only really been tested in Chrome, but other browsers should generally work.)
  • Check your browser addons. Try disabling them all. :ballot_box_with_check:

What is see now:


My browser version:

My OS:

I hope this helps.
Noé

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Thanks so much for the info. It looks like the issue is the 502 error or the SyntaxError (or they are related). I’ve tested things as best I can, but can’t find anything. Hopefully Blake or Hongda will be able to do better.

Meanwhile, can I just ask you to look deeper into these results?

  • On the “Failed to load resource” 502 error, at the right there’s a yellowish icon, I think it’s a network icon? Try clicking it and see what it says.
  • On the SyntaxError line, try opening that file, copy line 365 and paste it here.

Meanwhile, however, while poking around I did notice a small mistake in your translation.

"dn21:1.13.9": "_La première section de récitation est terminée._ ",

You’ve added _markdown_ for italics on this sentence. Please don’t do this!

  • The signs _underscore_ are for when you are quoting Pali (or Sanskrit) terms only. Never use them for anything else.
  • To add italics for emphasis, use *asterisks*.

Do not add italics for any other purpose. The line you have italicized is already marked with a special class in the HTML, you should not do anything to alter this. It is neither a quoted Pali word, nor is it an emphasized word.

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I was curious so I looked it up:

"dn21:1.13.9": "<p class='endsection'>{}</p>",
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