January is a wrap and it has been a pretty busy month.

The service uptime for January was 99,94%. That means that is to say Web Translate It was down for 24 minutes last month. It is up from the catastrophic 98,43% (11 hours, 41 minutes down) in December. This is much better, but my goal for February is to improve this.

Response time is slightly lower than last month, which is good (lower is better). I always do everything possible keep the service working, and working fast.

Feature-wise, there were 7 releases in January:

• New stats system with deferred calculations to calculate more stuff, faster.
• API and plugin enhancements so you can do more with your data.
• New reporting system to see the amount of strings and words over time and consequently bill your customers.
• Leaner interface, which makes the website load faster.
• Public projects. Web Translate It’s very first step in the world of crowd sourcing, and a huge improvement for Open Source projects.
• And finally, improved string history and threaded comments.

Web Translate It is in very active development and it is very exciting to see it quickly improving. I am always happy to hear your feedback if you have any suggestions to share.

So, what’s planned for February?

I plan to do 3 things: improve the Web Translate It plugin, improve the e-mail notifications and support Open Source projects better.

Better plugin

Well at its current state, it’s not really a plugin any more. If you don’t know it yet, Web Translate It has an open-source rubygem that provides a collection of useful rake tasks to sync back and forth your app’s language files with Web Translate It. If you use Ruby on Rails, there’s also a rack middleware built in that allow you to sync your files for each page requested.

A few weeks ago I pondered if I should make a plugin for other programming languages and frameworks. Now I think I won’t.

It would be a loss of time and energy. I would need to learn well different development frameworks in order to develop a plugin for them, and it would be a lot of work maintaining the different plugins and keeping up with their future versions.

I rather make one tool that works real good rather than three working poorly.

The next version of the plugin (or shall we call it client?) will be more generic, and the goal is to make it work well for any kind of project, as long as you have the programming language ruby installed on your machine.

Instead of rake tasks, the client will provide you with an handy executable you can run from any other programming language or framework. It will also be able to auto-configure itself as magically as possible.

If you want something native to your programming language, though, you can implement your own plugin, it is not very complicated.

Better E-mail notifications

To say it very frankly, Web Translate It’s e-mail notifications suck. If you have a large project with many translators, you just get too many e-mails and you probably already created a GMail filter for it. I will create some e-mail digests.

You will be able to choose the occurrence: once a week, once a day, every 4 hours or every 2 hours. Digests will only be sent if something happened since the last digest, and they contain a summary of your project’s activity since the last digest.

Better support for Open Source projects

I will work on a seamless integration with projects hosted on Github. Github is one of the largest open-source software hub.

There are two reasons I want to focus on this now:

• Web Translate It is a commercial software built on the shoulders of people who wrote open-source projects. I want to give back to the community what I took.
• Web Translate It needs to get known more, and supporting Open Source Software is best advertisement one can get!

Translating your project on github will be as simple as copy/pasting the address of your github project, and selecting where are the language files you want to translate.

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That will be it! If you have any feedback, please share on the support forum. Thank you for using Web Translate It!