Technical Questions

This section should hopefully answer any technical questions you have about The Voices of Many. If not, your question may be in the "General Questions" page, or maybe no-one has asked it yet. If it's a new question, please head over to our contact page where you can email us.

Technical Questions Answered:

1. What software do you use to run this site?
2. What language is the site written in?
3. Can I get a copy of the code?
4. How do you get other peoples' websites?
5. I'm a webmaster but I don't want your site translating my work. How do I do this?
6. Is the text translation identical to the webpage one?
7. What does it mean that the page is Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional?
8. What does it mean that the page is Valid CSS?
9. In The Voices of Many, you mess with other pages, are these Valid HTML or CSS afterwards?

1. What software do you use to run this site?
   The server runs Linux, with Apache as the web-server, MySQL as the database system and PHP as the language processor. Everything else is custom code written by me, in PHP.
2. What language is the site written in?
   At the time of writing, the language underpinning everything is PHP. The PHP system creates all the HTML for your browser, it downloads and processes other websites, and does just about everything. There is a smattering of SQL to talk to the database, but not a lot. The main webpage processor, url.php, is about 650 lines of tight PHP. This, however, does not include each of the voice modules, the longest of which are the ones in development and testing. Of the currently available ones on the site, the longest is Pig Latin, which is currently about 90 lines, although I'm sure this can be tightened up - I just haven't gotten round to it yet. For a general comparison, ROT13 is 3 lines, Up a Tree is 4 lines, Fudd and Sylvester are 8 lines each, Morse Code is 10 lines and SMS Txt is about 50.
3. Can I get a copy of the code?
   Unfortunately, as much as I am an advocate of open source, I am not in a position to release the code to the public. It's very complex and multilayered and looks like a mess anyway, so I'm not convinced anyone would actually want to see it. If you really really want to see it, or even need it, please contact me and we'll sort something out.
4. How do you get other peoples' websites?
   The whole process is rather involved, but it involves opening a standard HTTP connection, just like a browser would. More details can be found on the How It Works pages, which are here.
5. I'm a webmaster but I don't want your site translating my work. How do I do this?
   Well, if you don't want The Voices of Many to read your site at all, there are several ways you can do this. The removals page contains all the details you need. (As ever, any questions, please use the Contact page)
6. Is the text translation identical to the webpage one?
   Functionally, yes, any text put through the text translation system on the main page will be processed with the same routine as the webpage one - both call the same processing function, revoice_text(), which does the work. However, some modules rely on the usage of random numbers (e.g. Scrambler), which means the same block of text will vary between the two. It is written, however, so that any results generated should be consistent (if you type in exactly the same text/punctuation/digits etc each time, the results should be the same) Please see the How It Works pages for a more thorough guide.
7. What does it mean that the page is Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional?
   Well, all websites are written in a language called HTML (or possibly XHTML), which is a set of instructions to your computer software (maybe Internet Explorer, maybe FireFox, or Netscape or something similar), on how I want it to display the page. It includes all sorts of commands which tell your computer where to put pictures (and where to get them from), plus where links should go, what colours and style I want the fonts to be. However, some authors do not fully use the correct instructions they should do and mess things up. Any page which displays the Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional banner confirms that it has been checked against the official HTML specifications, version 4.01 (the main version at the time of writing), and that it is compliant against the Transitional branch. Others include Strict and Frameset. For more information, please see the website of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), located at www.w3c.org.
8. What does it mean that the page is Valid CSS?
   Well, further to the previous question, The Voices of Many takes advantage of a system called CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. It's a set of instructions that apply to the HTML instructions (see previous question). For example, I say that certain parts of a page are links, the Cascading Style Sheet tells your computer how to make the links look. At its simplest, it instructs the browser about colours, but does more than that.
9. In The Voices of Many, you mess with other pages, are these Valid HTML or CSS afterwards?
   Well, if the code was Valid HTML to start with, it will be Valid HTML when we're done. We don't touch any CSS at all, so if any CSS was valid, it will remain valid. We only touch certain parts of HTML instructions, and these are in accordance with the HTML specifications. (In fact, we spent quite a while looking at the HTML specifications to make sure we got it right)