Hebrew Year Conversion

Sunrise CalendarThere was a request on the Correspondence page of Remy Landau’s Hebrew Calendar Science and Myths site for a utility that generated “Hebrew Year Number Transliteration”. Since I had already developed the code as part of PhpGedView (now forked and maintained by webtrees) and the Hebrew date plugin, I just ported it to JavaScript as a demo.


Year: Include Thousands תשפ”ב


Search engine optimization?

Google Logo SepiaDo a Google search for "javadoc api" and amazingly the API Docs page shows up at number 9 (number 10 if you omit the quotes). I somehow doubt that the tweaks last week had this effect. I guess not too many pages have these words in the URL, title and page content. It’s still nice to be in the same list as Sun. Interestingly Sun did not end up in the first place. I found this via the log files when I noticed a referer (not a typo) of the Google search for javadoc api.

Zmanim Pages Updated

The static pages for the Zmanim project have been slightly updated. The main zmanim page has been revamped, an instruction page added and some other minor changes made. One change to the main page has been the addition of the list of types of zmanim that can be calculated. One reason for this change was for search engine optimization. I ran AWStats on the log files for the last month and a half and the following search phrases brought people to the site (listed in order of popularity)
“hebrew date”, “zman krias shema”, “hebrew date php”, “kosher coffee”, “zmanim nassau”, “zman tefilah”, “time of sun in zenith calculate”, “zmanim”, “wordpress hebrew”, “elevation of sun time of day”, “harfenes”, “asia generator”, “date hebrew”, “xsd time format”, “hebrew plugin”, “plag hamincha”, “get calendar java calc”, “zmanim calendar”, “jewish zmanim”, “calendar generator”, “milliseconds xsd time”, “annual calendar generator”, “java calculate start of the day”, “calculating sun zenith angle”, “calendrical spreadsheet”, “calculate mincha gedola”, “milliseconds into minutes”, “sun s zenith”, “javadoc api “, “time formats milliseconds”, “sof zman krias shema”.
The logs also showed that many people who were searching for zmanim related searches never moved beyond the JavaDocs pages that matched their query. The technical nature of the page probably threw them off. The addition of the listing of types of zmanim will hopefully lead many searchers to the main page instead of the JavaDocs page in the future.

New Version of the Hebrew Date Plugin Available

A new version (v0.3.0) of the Hebrew Date Plugin is now available. This fixes the post time formatting issue. The code is crude and relies on the detection of a ‘:’ in the Date String to determine that it is a time and not date. This works well with the Kubrick, the default WordPress 1.5 theme. Other themes that use alternate date formatting might not work perfectly with this plugin. It is worth noting that as far as I know, this plugin will only work with WP 1.5. The plugin does not require changes to the theme and can simply be activated from the Admin plugin screen.

WordPress Hebrew Date Plugin Alpha Release

I just hacked a simple plugin that displays Hebrew dates alongside the current Gregorian dates on posts. This is now active on this site. The alpha quality code (v0.2.0) is now available for your testing. For the most part the code is almost identical to the PHP code that I wrote to display Jewish dates in PhpGedView. While the PhpGedView code has various display options, for the sake of simplicity and the fact that I never wrote any WordPress plugins before, I did not code any of these options yet. Also not done is parsing of the “Month, Year” format of the archive pages. The PhpGedView code has many options such as displaying the dates in

  • Hebrew Only – י״ז סיון תשס״ה
  • Hebrew and Gregorian – June 24th, 2005 – י״ז סיון תשס״ה
  • Hebrew using the Latin characters – 17 Sivan 5765

and more. These may eventually be added to the plugin.