Yesterday I sat at home using my XP Media Center and decided to check out the Windows Live Gallery if ther were any new interesting Writer Plugins. I fired up Internet Explorer and browsed to the gallery via the link from one of my earlier posts to my Acronyms Plugin.
I ended up in an error page that said that the request could not be handled, pleas try again in five minutes. The page was in swedish and provided a link to the Gallery start page, which also was in swedish and there were no links to the Writer Plugins. To bad for people in sweden! But, it all worked fine on my laptop a few hours ago and my first guess, which was right, was that Internet Explorer was defaulting to the Swedish language (found under Internet Options - Languages), and my laptop used English (United States).
This, of course, made me to test some stuff - how do I change it to the english version without changing the browser!
This seemed more problematic than I expected! I tried to search for the plugin and found nothing, even when I specified to search in Enligsh.
I tried to sign in using my Windows Live account - did not matter. I tried to find some Settings on live.com that could change the market for the Gallery (this only worked on www.live.com not gallery.live.com). The help instructed me to change the IE settings.
I think not having the option to change language or as it is right now, you get an error when trying to reach a page that don’t exist in your language is embarrassing. I have worked with a lot of content management tools and they have at least a link to the page in the original language.
Please live.com team: implement an change language/market function for the different live.com sites and a better exception handling for languages.