Tamil Blogging 101!

I just began exploring the world of Tamil blogs and boy, am I surprised by so many amateur writers jotting down nice blogs about various things from, Abhirami andhadhi to Astrophysics to whatever one can be excited about!

And here are some things I have learnt that might be helpful for other people wanting to explore and eventually end up addicted to Tamil blogging!

• Viewing Tamil Blogs
  

If you have some trouble reading this page (or this "செந்தமிழ்த் தேன்மொழியாள்") clearly, then you need to set your computer to view Unicode fonts . To view Unicode Tamil text, you need to set the character encoding to UTF-8. But still, Firefox might actually mangle up the Tamil alphabets, like the khombu, kaal etc. To fix these problems, I did the following:

1. Installed the indic fonts package and restarted the computer - this step itself fixed most of the text in my Firefox.
2. Still there were still some mangled Tamil texts due to a Firefox bug in treating justified/aligned text - for this, Saravanan has posted a javascript fix that can be installed as part of the greasemonkey extension. Be sure to install the latest greasemonkey extension, since some older version is said to have some security vulnerability. It is quite simple thing to do - just install the greasemonkey and then save Saravanan's script and add it to greasemonkey as mentioned in Saravanan's fix page. A Tamil version of the procedure is posted here by Mayuran.

• Typing Tamil Unicode text

There are different ways to do this. Here are 2 that I tried:

1. This seems to be the simplest way to start typing in Tamil Unicode: Using a Online Tamil Unicode Transliterator from Vijay Lakshminarayanan. You just type "thamiz" and it generates "தமிழ்" and you just copy and paste the tamil text into your blog editor and publish it! To include English words, you just need to use the ` character before and that text will appear as it is.
   
2. To type emails or in other text boxes directly, I find the e-kalappai program pretty useful. the feature I like in it, is the ability to switch between Tamil and English text while typing emails simply using alt-1 and alt-2 keys - which feels more like the escape modes in vi... (there seems to be an alternative firefox extension to do the same thing - but I haven't tried it)

Now you can set off, exploring the jungle of Tamil blogs from syndication sites like தமிழ்மணம் or தேன்கூடு...

Thats it for now, folks...

தமிழ் பதிவுலகம் உங்களை இனிதே வரவேற்கின்றது!