For the past two to three months in my spare time, which I barely have these days, I created a new project called Polyglot Link.
A polyglot is someone who speaks a lot of languages. The consensus on the exact amount is not known. I would say 4 and up, but this of course differs. Polyglot Link however is a place to provide a platform for language learning & polyglot blogs. It’s basically a directory for the learner to discover the language learning blogging community.
I created this website, because I wanted to discover blogs myself. I’m quite familiar with the Chinese language learning blogs, but I’m looking to learn a new language in the near future. It is a battle between Spanish, French and Japanese.
Instead of starting at one blog and following the blogroll grapevine, or asking a community, who might not even be in the know of all the blogs, I decided to create a directory of sorts. Here language learning bloggers can submit their own blogs.
It is a reciprocal relationship between the blogger who would like to share their blogs to more readers and the learner who would want to explore the community and find extremely valuable language learning content in the language they are interested in.
About a month and a half ago I asked communities to start submitting their blogs for the launch. There are now over 30 blogs. Chinese being the most populated. We also have some cool languages like Navajo and Hawaiian. They are sparsely populated though.
I coded the site using Node.js, MongoDB with Masonry, Jade & Bootstrap. The blog is my own custom wordpress theme adapted from the site design. The site is hosted on Heroku and all images are on Amazon’s S3, while the blog is hosted on my own shared server.
Node.js might be overkill for a static site like this, but hey, this the first site I’ve coded from scratch with its own database. I was comfortable with it. Perhaps I’ll add a map in the future.
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