By Edouard on December 1, 2009
On Saturday the 5th of December between 9AM and 11AM will be a maintenance window on both Web Translate It and on the beta version of Web Translate It.
During these two hours the website will be inaccessible as I will migrate the database and the application to a new server. The API will be accessible during the maintenance so it won’t impact your website.
By Edouard on December 1, 2009
Yesterday has been the busiest day of Web Translate It’s history. We completely outreached the number of visits and pages viewed. Many new visitors have been trying Web Translate It’s demo which resulted in a fairly high, although sustainable server load.
Around 5AM GMT the cron job that back up our database started. This backup is usually done in less than 5 minutes. Due to the high server load we were experiencing, after more than 30 minutes the backup was still not finished, at which time another resource-hungry task started. This abnormal accumulation of heavy tasks at the same time jammed our web server, at which point the service became unresponsive.
Around 9AM GMT I noticed the service was not responding and I rebooted the server, which instantly restored Web Translate It’s service back to business.
I am really sorry about this downtime. This is the biggest downtime in Web Translate It’s history. I strive for delivering high quality and highly available software to my customers, which I failed to provide this morning.
I will take the following actions:
I will set up the monitoring system to send e-mail and SMS when the server load is extremely high. At the moment I am only notified when the server goes completely down.
I will migrate Web Translate It to a more beefy server. I was planning such a migration after Christmas holiday but I will do my best to order a new server and migrate the entire service before the beginning of next week.
Again, I am very sorry for any and all problems this has caused and hope that you will give us a chance to re-earn your trust and continued business.
By Edouard on November 27, 2009
I just finished a new feature for Web Translate It and it is so much a change I would like you to try it first and get your feedback before rolling it on the main website.
This new feature is a completely rethought translation interface. I hope it makes it more efficient to work. Let’s see what’s new in this interface.
Enough said, go over at beta.webtranslateit.com and give it a try. Please note that the data used on this site is the live data and sync with the regular Web Translate It. It use the same database.
The first thing you will notice is that there is no more pagination. The page is endless: the more you scroll, the more strings are automatically loaded. This is very convenient to translate hundreds of strings in a row: you don’t have to interrupt your work to click on “next page” and wait for the next page to load: the next page is loaded when you’re about to be out of strings to work.
The interface is also much more minimalist than the current one. By default nothing is displayed but the content to translate. This is a great for reviewing your work.
When you hover a string, more information appear. Namely the key name of the string and a few options.
When you click on a string, a text area appears and let you compose or edit your translation.
When you are done, click save or just leave it for later: you can also save your translations in batch with the “Save my changes” button, which is much more efficient than the current “Save all” button.
Once the string is saved, your will notice the color in the right border has changed to red to orange: this is the status indicator. It means the string was “not translated” and it is not “not proofread”.
To proofread the string, click on the proofread button, and the status color dynamically update from dotted orange to plain green.
This is the scheme everywhere on Web Translate It: dotted stuff are things to do, plain stuff are things done. The colours give you a more precise indication of the status: green is for “done”, orange is for “not proofread” and red is for “not done at all”.
Less frequently used functionalities are gone in a menu you can activate by clicking on “Options”.
The most used functionalities such as commenting or proofread/unproofread are visible and usable by directly clicking the button.
I think you’ve got it! A finished project should look like a very long green line. Any string to do is easily identifiable.
Please share what you think about this on our forum.
If you haven’t tried Web Translate It yet, create a demo account with unlimited access that will allow you to try it after just one click.
By Edouard on November 26, 2009
I am pretty excited about this. When you are new to the tool or never heard of it, choosing a plan and creating a user account sure is intimidating. “What are the implications of what I am doing? Will I have to pay anything?”
If you only want to take a look at it, why not skipping this part?
In just a click you will get access to the full-fledged, top of the line Web Translate It plan. You can try it for 3 hours for free, at which point we will delete your demo account and all of its data.
To make your testing experience more enjoyable, this demo account come pre filled with an example project.
By Edouard on November 23, 2009
A maintenance window is planned tonight for Web Translate It between 9PM to 9.30PM GMT as we are migrating our assets (Javascript and CSS and images) to a proper CDN.
If everything goes according to the plan there should be no downtime and you should only notice a nice speed boost :)
Edit 9.45PM: I am a bit late, but it is done. All Web Translate It’s static content (images, Javascript and CSS) are served by 4 different buckets (or instances of) Amazon S3. This should speed up the loading of these assets and give WTI’s server a bit more overhead to serve actual pages to you.
By Edouard on November 18, 2009
I just pushed a very small update to Web Translate It to fix a few user interfaces I had gripes with. Yep, it’s the second update of the day. The differences are quite subtle but I think they make a difference. Read on.
The activity feed show the last activity on your project. It displays the last translations, the last comments and the last files uploaded to the system. The problem is that showing all the translations is sometimes a little bit too much information, which makes the activity feed useless in practice, because you miss the important things.
To fix this issue, the feed about translations are now grouped by author and language.
You can see the hidden translations by clicking on “XX worked a few more strings”. It toggles the rest of the translations the translator has worked on.
On the project page you can now see the comments you haven’t read yet. This is useful if you deactivated the email notifications for Web Translate It in your settings page.
There are also two subtle UI touches on the comment popup. The first one is the “Answer this question” button.
When you click it, it prepares your answer: the drop-down is automatically set to “answer” and the text area gets the focus. Like so:
The second new feature here is the “Mark as answered” button. It basically close the question without answering it. This is useful because sometimes the question has been answered via another medium (email, chat or phone).
There are more language switch throughout the pages and they are better. The old javascript-y toggles have been replaced by a simple drop-down, which are more efficient to use. Often simpler is better.
I hope you will appreciate this (very tiny) update, which should make your commenting experience much better!
Thank you for using Web Translate It.
By Edouard on November 18, 2009
These last two weeks have been hectic. Features-wise there is not much new, but a lot of important work has been done.
Web Translate It now support Internet Explorer 7 and 8. We also support Firefox 3, Safari 3 and 4.
We don’t support and don’t have plans to support Internet Explorer 6. You will have a better experience using Web Translate It with a recent web browser such as Firefox 3 or Safari. We will work on supporting Firefox 2 in the next weeks.
The commenting system is much better. You can now notify users from a comment.
This is very useful to ask a question about a string to whom it may concern.
One useful feature for translators is the ability to count the number of words in a project. You can now request this data and Web Translate It will send you an e-mail with this information.
Finally Web Translate It can accept payments. The payment system use Paypal for now. That was not an easy treat to implement and it took much longer than I expected.
Web Translate It is getting better and better. Have you a website or software to translate, Web Translate It can help to make this task simpler. Check out our plans, they all come with a 1 month free trial.
If you have any questions, please let us know on our support forum or directly by email.
By Edouard on November 2, 2009
In an effort to make Web Translate It easier to integrate with your application I developed a Ruby on Rails plugin for Web Translate It.
It provides a rake task to fetch your translations
rake trans:fetch
You can also setup the plugin to “autofetch” your translations, the plugin will look for and fetch new translations for every page loaded on your site. This means a translator can translate a string on Web Translate It, reload a page on your website and see instantly the translation she made in context.
Please refer to the documentation on github.
For more help with regards to Web Translate It integration, please have a look at the integration help section on Web Translate It.
I plan to create plugins for the popular frameworks Django and Cake PHP.
I hope you will find this plugin useful. Should you notice any issue or have a feature request for this plugin, please open an issue on Github’s issue tracking system.
By Edouard on October 29, 2009
I just rolled out an update to Web Translate It. The update fixes a couple of bugs with the plural forms, and better the File Manager and the importers.
Your list of files is now easier to use. On the File Manager home page you will see a list of Master language file, that is, the files in the language you want to translate from.
If you click on “View Translations”, you will see the target files, that is, the language files you want to translate to.
On this page, you can now rename the files. This is useful to map your Web Translate It projects to your project’s language file architecture. For example, some projects are organised this way:
o locales
o en
- locale.po
- another_file.po
o fr
- locale.po
- another_file.po
Now you can name your English file “en/locale.po” or your French file “fr/locale.po”. Web Translate It is clever enough to recognise you need subdirectories to organise your files and will create it for you when you download your project in a zip file.
The last improvement is support for language file headers. If you import a language file that contains some copyright or important information, Web Translate It will save it and will export your language files with that header.
You can as well edit the headers in Web Translate It’s interface, like so:
I hope this new addition helps you manage your files better in Web Translate It!
By Edouard on October 24, 2009
Thanks for everyone who gave Web Translate It a try and for the kind words, in your different, beautiful languages.
Since the opening to the public last week I have been hard at work. I improved some existing features and added a few new features. Let’s have a look on what is new.
Comments are now slightly more sociable.
For example, let’s pretend I am a translator and I have a question about the context of a string to a developer.
So let’s write a comment. The new feature here is that I can mark comments as “annoucements”, “questions” and “answers”. Let’s mark it as a question.
The questions not yet answered are displayed on the project home page until they are answered, like so.
If anyone has an answer to a question, she can mark the comment as an “answer” and the topic will be marked as answered.
Comments are now a very efficient way to communicate within the team. Besides, any comment you write are imported/exported with the language files.
There are many improvements on this page. The biggest new feature is that it integrates an activity feed.
You can see at a glance what has been done in your project lately.
That’s not all. The raw project statistics have been replaced by charts.
All put together, it gives the following page.
The global, raw statistics from the old project page are gone to a new Language page.
Search is better, too. You can now search for strings in a specific language.
Results are also more relevant. You can search through the translations, the key names and the developer comments, if available.
The blank slates (for example the project page for a newly created project) have been drastically improved.
The long “locale select of doom” that was showing 300-ish locales in a drop-down had his time and has been replaced by a shiny field with auto complete. You can just type the beginning of the locale name or locale code (German or de_DE) and select it in the list. Much easier!
The “people and language” page was a page that allowed you to create new languages for your project, as well as inviting new users to your project.
All these important actions in one page wasn’t making it particularly easy to use, so I split it into two pages: the “Users” page and the “Languages” page.
I hope you will enjoy this new version of Web Translate It. If you have any remarks, questions and suggestion, please write a message on our support forum.
By Edouard on October 21, 2009
Call Me Fishmeal.: Lost in Translations.
Wil Shipley from Delicious library explain how he localise his mac software.
Web Translate It support .strings files, too.
By Edouard on October 14, 2009
Yes, you read it right: Web Translate It has launched.
A few bug fixes here, a few little features there, and few enhancements here again…. The biggest feature really is the payment system, so I can now welcome new customers.
Look how slick the importer/exporter is now. It now has a nice progress bar and display how much time is left before completion. So now you know if you have the time to grab a cup of coffee or not.
Another minor but essential improvement is the word counter. It counts for you how many words there is in a project.
This part is completely new. This is where you manage your organisation (company or group), your billing information, the plan you choose, and so on. From there, you can change you plan, see at a glance how many strings you are using on your quota and park the projects you don’t use.
Do you have a website or software to translate? Give it a try, you will get a 30-day trial so it won’t cost you a thing. If you don’t like it, just let the trial expire and we will delete your data.
By Edouard on October 13, 2009
Web Translate It currently use a very basic disk cache to display faster a lot of different things. Disk cache is simple to implement, however it is not very efficient as it needs to access the hard disk to invalidate the cache.
Under high server load it even causes some malfunctions as it sometimes become slower to invalidate the cache than displaying a page.
On Saturday afternoon I will migrate the cache system to Memcache which will solve these problems and probably speed things a little bit up. I shouldn’t take the site down, but it is probably wise not to plan to do any important work on Web Translate It from noon to 1PM GMT.
By Edouard on October 5, 2009
I released a new feature on Web Translate It today. You can now create custom filters and sort strings using these filters.
The user interface is slightly different than draft I made the other day, because it wasn’t working as soon as there are a lot of filters.
Here we look at all the strings in the project.
Now, if I want, I can have a look at the new strings I added 1 week ago. As you can see, the statistics change as well.
Now I want to sort the strings I added a month ago, which are on this template edit_profile.tpl. Let’s create a custom filter that match the template I want in my project.
And we can now select “1 month ago” and “edit_profile.tpl”.
This is very flexible. You can also filter by file name and key name. I hope you will find this feature useful.
By Edouard on October 2, 2009
This month I have been releasing only very few new features. I have also been working on the website’s performance.
“Search” seems to be such a little feature. It’s actually used a lot, needs to search everything and fast. It has been quite complex to implement.
Given the amount of string entries we are dealing with (we currently have more than 30,000 strings in database without having officially launched), and because we want a full-text search, it becomes quickly inefficient to directly query our database.
The solution for this problem is a search engine. In the background, an indexer look at the database for changes in the strings and well, index these changes. On the front-end, a search server check the index and respond quickly to your queries.
I chose Sphinx because it is fast, lightweight and under active development. It also has awesome plugins for Ruby on Rails, I chose Thinking Sphinx, which has an amazing documentation.
Another small improvement is the ability to save all the strings in the page. This has been requested by our beta testers. Furthermore, Web Translate It can now display developer comments. Developers can put there explanations or links to example pages.
I have also been working on the help section. It actually is a wiki, users will be able to write there tips and tricks.
I have been rewriting the Yaml importer and exporter from scratch. The version I had was not capable to handle Rails’s plural forms. Also, more validations are now done before actually triggering the importers, therefore more availability and less failures.
Lastly, since today we also support PHP .ini and Java .properties files.
This was also technically thrilling: The API now supports Conditional GET Requests.
If you provide your request with a context (a HTTP header that include the date of last modification of your file), the new API will respond with a sensible HTTP status code.
If there has been changes since your last call, it will respond with the code 200 OK along with your translations. If there aren’t any changes, it will respond with a mere 304 Not Modified without your translations.
Needless to say, respond something empty is blazing fast.
To accommodate this feature, I also have been optimising Apache, which now supports Gzip compression, page caching and E-tags. The YSlow plugin for Firefox and Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site have been inestimable resources for this work. Web Translate It really feels much faster now.
Finally, I upgraded Ruby, the language that powers Web Translate It to a slightly newer version. Because traffic is still quite low, it is hard to notice any improvements on speed, but I noticed a huge drop in memory consumption.
That’s it for this month. This is probably the last time I write a monthly status update. I release a new version of Web Translate It weekly, so it is hard for me to compile all my work in a post, and it makes rather long posts. I’d rather post weekly updates or “feature by feature” updates for large features.
Finally, as usual: Web Translate It is currently open for beta testers, so if you want to test Web Translate It for free, send me an email at edouard@atelierconvivialite.com.
By Edouard on October 2, 2009
I just released a new version of Web Translate It. Unfortunately the string filtering feature didn’t make it and will be pushed another week further. It requires some important work to integrate well with the statistics system. Besides, a few other important features required all my attention.
Here’s what’s new:
By Edouard on September 21, 2009
Web Translate It has reached the point we call the “minimum viable product”. Do you need a translation management system for you project? Join and test it.
Web Translate It is not ready for prime time yet but it already works really well. Do you have a project to translate? Are you interested by trying it before everyone else? Please contact me to get a beta tester account.
You will gain access to a web-based translation system that makes it easy for human translators to collaborate. During the beta time, using it will be free. After the launch date you will have to choose if you want to continue to use it and pay, or not use it. Web Translate It will remain free for Open Source project.
Web Translate It can help you to translate 3 things:
It also solves a few problems in the translation process:
Web Translate It integrate an easy to use and efficient translation interface. The whole translation team can work on your translations directly in a web browser. The translators can ask questions to the developer through a commenting system. The developer can see when his translation work is finished in the Project Statistics, and download all the language files at once in a zip file.
Web Translate It has a very simple API. If you work on translating a website, you are invited to set up a staging site for the translators to test their translations. You could make your staging site fetch and display the latest translations for every page load. Translating a website and testing your translations is as simple as saving your translations and checking the result on the staging website. If you are a software developer, you could develop a system that regularly builds your application against the latest translations.
Web Translate It keep an history of everything that happened on a string: who translated it, who proofread that and when. You can also revert the string to a previous version. This feature is crucial for an efficient translation workflow.
Developers, developing yet another hasty web-based translation software is a loss of time. Developing good software takes time. Translators don’t like to work on slow or buggy tools. Besides, our API afford a tight integration to your system, as if Web Translate It was hosted on your system.
Subscribe to the RSS feed for frequent product updates, follow us on Twitter or join our mailing list if you want to get an email when we launch our product.
By Edouard on July 13, 2009
Wow, how can it already be mid-July? We have been pretty busy refactoring Web Translate It and adding new features. Here is what we have been up to.
It feels like June went very quickly, and when we look back it seems we haven’t done much this month. The truth is that we have been working on some rather tricky features.
Gettext .po is widely use, but we really wanted to support two other file formats: Apple .strings and Rails .yml. This is now implemented, which means you will be able to use Web Translate It to translate your Mac and iPhone applications, as well as Ruby on Rails websites! Along the way we refactored and improved our importer/exporter engines to be more abstract, so supporting more file formats will now be easy. We’re quite thrilled about this.
Remember our CPU-hungry processes we run as background jobs? They took a little while to perform, without any feedback. Not anymore: we thought giving our users a little bit of feedback wouldn’t hurt.
Also, downloading every single file one by one can quickly become unpleasant if your project is translated in lots of different languages. You can now download all your language files in a zip file containing all your language files.
The next release will be mainly focused on improving the interface usability, particularly the on the interface to assign jobs to your team, and invite other team members, which is rather cumbersome at the moment.
We will also improve our import/export engines a bit more. We will introduce support for plural forms in .po and .yml, which is a big piece of work.
What’s left after all this? We need to rework the translation interface: better interface for comments, code colorisation in translation forms, ability to filter strings by status, etc, and finally implement a payment system.
Once it will be completed it will be finally time to launch! We’re getting there.
For frequent updates, follow us on twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed. If you want us to contact you as soon as we launch join our mailing list on the Web Translate It website.
We also have our customer support forum on GetSatisfaction if you have any ideas, enquiries or suggestions.
By Edouard on May 31, 2009
June is here. While we still don’t have much to show you, a lot of things have happened during these last two months.
We have been busy working these last two months and made lots of improvements on Web Translate It.
We hope to have something substantial to show you this summer. Here’s what we have been up to.
Back in April we launched a temporary front page for Web Translate It to present our product. Since then, a lot has happened.
We’ve been working on a brand new design, implemented a few new features, dusted off some scalability problems and have drastically simplified our product’s architecture.
Remember the sketch we posted a few weeks ago?
Well, after using it ourselves, it didn’t felt right so we went back to our pencils and came up with something dramatically simpler.
This is very green. If you don’t like it, you will be able to change the background and header colour to your taste.
This new design is much more simple and will allow easier modifications in the future.
We worked on a new page we call the “String Log” (screen-grab above). This is basically a page showing the details of what happened on a string: translations changes, status changes, comments posted, in a chronological order. We still have a bit more cosmetic work to do on it.
We also worked on implementing string export, so you can actually fetch your languages files once the translation work is done. It’s not entirely finished yet, but the engine is here and ready to use.
We noticed some performance issues while importing large languages files to our system. These kind of tasks simply take too much time to perform online.
So we moved these CPU-hungry tasks as background jobs. It was a very interesting project to do. We’ll write another post later to share our experience on this.
As much as we try to keep things simple, some parts of our product seemed very complex to use so we reworked them in a much more simple way.
We also rewrote our .pot file parser from scratch, as the one we were using was blatantly inefficient.
Some of our work cannot be seen. We set up a communication system, a server monitoring system, and tuned our backup system.
Our source code and our database are backed up to an offsite server every day.
We also installed some tools to help us code better.
We now have a continuous integration server, Integrity.
Every time we we push code to the main branch, Integrity runs the website’s batch of tests and tells us the result on Campfire.
Of course we test our code locally on our computers while we code, but several times we committed code breaking the test suite without noticing.
It is now impossible to ignore it.
“You can’t control what you can’t measure”. We run software metrics on our code since four days now.
It seems promising and will help us a lot to improve our code.
Inspired by the good folks at Thoughtbot we chose metric_fu, a tool to generate software metrics for ruby code.
Basically, metric_fu calculates everyday a few software metrics from our source code and notifies us from design issues, code smells, missing test cases, duplicated or too complex code.
Flog and Rcov are amazingly useful.
Now, the vanilla metric_fu doesn’t look so hot. So we decided to go ahead and use Thoughbot’s fork which is aesthetically more appealing, and since we were at it we made it a bit better.
Our fork automatically generates and includes graphs showing our day-to-day progression. Grab our fork at Github.
Edit: our changes have actually been pull to the official metric_fu.
We launched our company website/blog a few weeks ago to be as transparent as possible and talk about what we are doing.
We are really pleased to read you left us a few comments and we hope we’ll have the opportunity to discuss more.
If you want to hear from us or get in touch, you can use the comments here, or use our customer support forum at GetSatisfaction or send us an email.
If you prefer to just watch what is going on you can subscribe to the RSS feed for frequent updates, or join our mailing list if you want to get an email when we launch our product.
By Edouard on May 18, 2009
Since Étienne and I work remotely from France and Sweden we crafted an efficient internal communication tool based on Campfire. Check out how we work.
Étienne works from Paris, France and I work from Linköping, a middle-sized town in Sweden. We are about 1600 kilometers far away. Luckily we don’t have any time-zone on the way, but we do have day jobs, which means we often work asynchronously.
We use 37Signal’s Campfire for our daily talk.
Campfire logs everything that has been said in a transcript and that’s very convenient: it allows both immediacy and asynchrony.
For example, if I am away for a few days I can look through Campfire’s transcripts when I come back and see what Étienne did and what were his blocks and problems.
Since I see every details on the transcript, I don’t need to ask him anything. It’s a great time saver.
In the same handy fashion I can ask a question to Étienne on Campfire while he’s away. He will answer me the next time he logs in, even if I am not logged in myself.
On top of that we run a few notification scripts shaped to our needs.
We use Git for our code versioning. Every time we push code to our repository a notification message is displayed on our Campfire chat room.
This is great for awareness and to discuss about code changes.
This is really an easy script, but we’ve open sourced it.
We use Redmine to keep track of our features and bugs.
This is a great open source web-based tool for collaborative work, but since all our attention is focused on our Campfire chat room our actions on Redmine lacked of visibility.
So we made a plugin to notify each-other of every ticket changes, edits on our internal wikis and forums.
This is very convenient, we can see how a project is going at a glance.
We made this Redmine plugin available.
This is important to notify each-other when we deploy in case something gets awry. So we display a notification message as well as a message explaining what the deploy is for.
This one is quite new and is not really usable yet. We setup our monitoring system to display alerts for some of our most critical processes.
Note: this is not an actual alert
We can also easily display monitoring graphs on Campfire to quickly show what’s wrong and discuss on how to fix it.
Here our server’s memory usage seems quite high.
That’s about it! Using this tool is really handy, and I don’t think we could work as efficiently without it.
