Here’s a quote from the GNU gettext utilities page:

After preparing the sources, the programmer creates a PO template file. This section explains how to use xgettext for this purpose.

xgettext creates a file named domainname.po. You should then rename it to domainname.pot. (Why doesn’t xgettext create it under the name domainname.pot right away? The answer is: for historical reasons. When xgettext was specified, the distinction between a PO file and PO file template was fuzzy, and the suffix ‘.pot’ wasn’t in use at that time.)

So that’s it. It’s the same file, with a different name. Just thought I’d mention that, considering how much time I pissed off trying to find the answer!

[edit]
It looks like Wordpress sees this a little differently. the POT file, the “PO” Template, is the raw output from the xgettext, untranslated. the PO file is the text-editable and edited pot file with the translations. the MO file is built with msgfmt (among others) and is what is actually used by php’s gettext.

GNU ‘gettext’ Utilities

These docs for gettext are C-oriented, but the associated tools such as xgettext are easily used by PHP, so let’s not get too excited about the C.
And I’m going to assume you have installed GNU’s gettext on your system.  I’m pretty sure it arrives by default with your ubuntu or other linux installation.  Mac and Windows you’re going to have to find for yourself

Edited:  download GetText for Windows here

There’s also a lot of emacs crap in this doc, which I’m also going to ignore.  We’re going to use tools like poedit, gtranslator for what we need … coming posts.

on my ubuntu 9.10 box the following command installs the php-gettext stuff in /usr/share/php/php-gettext

and includes these three files:

• gettext.inc
• gettext.php
• streams.php

I’m not going to deal with the internals of these files here in this post.

What I do is copy these into my working project somewhere, say in a subdirectory named “library”, “lib”, “i18n” … etc. I’m going to call it ./library/i18n just for this.

.po, .pot, .mo files – what are these?

http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Files

That’s about all for now, sorry I couldn’t be more helpful in this post.  This is just the setup stuff I’ve done for my new entry into this world of Internationalisation (i18n), Localisation (l10n), and Native Language Support (NLS) — see Concepts.

That's right.  I remember getting on the plane in Madison, Wisconsin, sometime in the afternoon of January 13th.  22 hours later my flight from Frankfurt Germany landed in Sofia, in a blizzard!
Nedda and Ivan were there to meet me.  We followed a couple of snow plows clear across Bulgaria, until we turned south to Burgas.

So anyway, here we are, here I am.  Tonight Zlatina and I are going to entertain a little, we invited people over from her school, and I invited everybody who had anything to do with my being here.  We'll have a nice social time, with some rosé and white wine chilled on the balcony, some red wine, and stuff like that.

It may be that some of the people won't be able to make it.  Folks here in southeastern Bulgaria are not used to the kind of cold we're having here this past week – many engines won't start.  Deep snow is still all over the place, the roads have been turned into glaciers, and it's hard freezing every night.

But we'll try.  Happy Anniversary Kevin.

Oh, by the way, the forecast for tomorrow calls for more heavy snow.

 It started snowing Monday night about 6pm, and continued until tonight (Tuesday) about 8pm.  Heavy snow, in fact all the people I talked to here today in Burgas say it's the heaviest snow they've ever seen here.

I took a nice walk from our new place on Rilska street, down to Bogoridi, to the Sea Garden …. out to the end of the pier, on to the beach … back through the sea garden.  You can see the pictures below in the embedded picasweb link.

What a great day it's been.  It reminds me so much of living in Madison, Wisconsin in the US.  Sure, it's not quite as cold here – just a few degrees below freezing, and it only snows like this once a decade here where it snows like this repeatedly throughout the winter in Wisconsin – but hey, it does remind me of the past three winters I spent in Madison, and I did like the winters there for some weird reason

I guess I have to say that Varna is a prettier city than Burgas, a larger city.  Certainly more attractive than Sofia … in fact it kind of reminds me of Seattle, only without all the rain all the time.  The city puts up lots of christmas lights, keeps them on through the new year.  I hope to go out tomorrow night and take some slow-shutter speed photos to show you.

Well, I ate too much at dinner again, seems it's the time of year for that.  Good night, and have a happy new year of if you can.

Link to Photos from our Varna vacation

The word of the day is ‘Starbucks’

Picasaweb Photos

I used WP-SyntaxHighlighter, I tried some others, but the simplest and most expedient plugin I found for highlighting code in my blogs comes from Dmytro Shteflyuk’s Code Colorer.
Like most of them it’s based on the Geshi Generic Syntax Highlighter … much easier syntax.

I recommend this one for bloggers who wish to include code in their posts.