David's Computer Stuff Journal

Normally, it's pretty easy in Rails to take advantage of the simple i18n tools provided.  You just write I18n.t("some_key") and it'll translate that into whichever language.

Today, however, I discovered what seems like a problem.  If you do I18n.t(""), it returns a hash of all possible translations!  And if you give it a nil, it returns an error because that's not a key in the DB.

The first behavior doesn't sound correct at all, and the second seems dubious as well.  I'm thinking about fixing it like so:
 

  def translate(key, options = {})
    return nil if key.nil?
    return "" if key == ""
    locale = options.delete(:locale) || I18n.locale
    backend.translate(locale, key, options)
  rescue I18n::ArgumentError => e
    raise e if options[:raise]
    send(@@exception_handler, e, locale, key, options)
  end

Is there any reason not to do this?

In keeping with the idea that I want to focus on things where I sell something directly to people, rather than just advertising, I am putting http://www.squeezedbooks.com up for auction on flippa.com.  The auction is here:

http://flippa.com/auctions/99073/Business-Book-Summary-Site

Here's what I wrote about it:

I like to read business books, but many of them contain a nugget of valuable information, and lots of fluff, because you can't sell a 10 page book.  Some of them are pure fluff!  Occasionally, one of them has profound implications.

I created this site several years ago in order to have a place to summarize a series of books I'd read, with the aim of creating a community interested in summarizing and, most of all, discussing business books.  To be honest, that community hasn't really materialized, although there are a number of registered users (585 at last count).  Most other business book summary sites are for-pay - you pay $X dollars a month and receive Y summaries.  I wanted to create an open site, in order to foster discussion and communication between people reading summaries.

In any case, one baby later and in a different country, my heart isn't really in it any more, so I've decided to put the site up for sale.  I still think the idea is a good one, and that in the right hands, the site could take off.

It was a fun site to work on, and really do think that in the right hands, it, or something derived from it, could be successful.  I could conceivably hang on to it and keep trying different things with it, but I've decided I really need to impose this limitation of "make something to sell directly" on myself in order to avoid wandering off into "cool, but no idea how to make money" projects.

Edit:

One thing that I'd like to state explicitly and publicly is that I'm not giving up on open source, just that I think I need to draw a really clear line between "I hope to make some money with this" and "this is a cool project I want to share with the world".  In other words, I think I'd rather avoid the middle ground where stuff is sort of openish, and go either for projects that pay directly, or stuff that's pure open source under an Apache or BSD license.  Hopefully, if I ever hit on a project that takes off, I'll be able to dedicate some time/resources to open sourcing some of the infrastructure, as I think that's currently one of the better models for producing open source software.