CIARIS Portugal - in Portuguese

I have almost finished designing the blog for CIARIS Portugal - "Apoiando o combate à pobreza e exclusão social em Portugal".

The idea is for the coordinator to be able to learn to work with Typepad himself. The process of doing this made me more conscious of some of the language issues. Typepad (and I'm talking about the Pro version) is not difficult to use and it does a lot of the visual layout for you. But it doesn't do a version in Portuguese, so the instructions are in English. And to change the names of the categories or the "about" page to "sobre" or "comments" to "comentários" etc. then you have to use the advanced template, you need to know how to use HTML and you need to be able to follow instructions in English.

This makes using Typepad and the system I've set up a higher leap on the learning curve for grassroots activists, many of whom won't read much in English and won't know how to use HTML. So, the more sophisticated things you can do with it are harder to get to. However, I did read somwhere that Typepad (and Blogger) were the most widely used blogs in Portugal.

In Blogger, which has less of the potential advantages to Typepad Pro, you get your interface and a lot of the functions in eight different languages (including Brazilian Portuguese). I also noticed and appreciated that you can use Bloglines, which I use for the blogroll, in different languages too (including Portuguese).