Investors say you should be able to explain your projet on the back of a business card. Describing it very simply is always a very difficult exercise, and it often validates whether a project is viable or not.

This is the same for the presentation pages of a web product: the fewest presentation pages the better. There should be only one page. Visitors won’t read them all and will miss some important points otherwise.

Before today, Web Translate It had 3 presentation pages besides the home page. There was “Why using Web Translate It?”, “Integrate your app with Web Translate It” and finally, the “Tour” page, which was horribly out of date.

Information was spread across these 3 pages, which were repeating themselves and weren’t up to date. The problem was:

• visitors didn’t understand what is Web Translate It.
• it was 3 times more work to update these pages when I released a new feature, as I needed to update them all.
• finally, the “why” and “integration” page were totalling more than 700 words. Now I start translating Web Translate It, this is a very important matter.

So I deleted the 2 former pages and instead made a much better Tour page.

The page is more aerated, the font is more readable and invites people to read on. I also added more screenshots and a screencast.

It contains lots of useful information, and even if you are already a Web Translate It user, you can learn a few tips to work faster.

Some users have been recommending Web Translate It to their clients and friends. I am really grateful for your help and to encourage you recommending Web Translate It, I just launched an affiliate program.

What is it?

In a nutshell, the affiliate program allows you to earn cash commissions when people sign up for a paying Web Translate It account.

The rules are pretty simple:

• Every Web Translate It user has an unique referrer code you can find on the affiliates page. You refer someone and give this person your code. To become a referrer, join Web Translate It.
• The user you refer signs up for a Medium, Large or Extra Large account (or signs up for a free account and then upgrade to a paying account later).
• The user your refer keeps a paying account for at least 60 days.
• You then receive a one-time cash commission of 20 euros to your Paypal account.

If the user your referred forgot to enter the referrer code, no sweat: just drop me a line and I will fix it for you.

If you have any questions about the affiliate program, send me an e-mail at support@atelierconvivialite.com.

Thank you for your trust and for using Web Translate It.

I just pushed a new feature to Web Translate It that will make it really easy to translate an open-source project hosted on Github.

Have it your way

There are many ways to update or sync your language files with Web Translate It.

• You can upload your language file by uploading it in the web interface,
• You can use our gem and sync your local files with Web Translate It using the command line,
• And from now on, you can upload and keep your language files in sync with another server.

On the File Manager, you can now specify the path to a language file hosted online.

You can use this new feature to link to any file accessible by HTTP, like a RAW file hosted on github.

Tick the “Check for updates periodically” checkbox and we will check for updates on this file daily. If there are new strings to translate, Web Translate It will send you an e-mail to let you know.

One more thing

We also have a post-receive URL that will check for updates on your file every time you push code to your github repository.

For more information, please refer to the documentation.

If you are not using github, you can still use this feature, as long as the language files are accessible via HTTP (using trac or gitweb for example). You can also use the post-receive URL feature, which works with every SCM.

I hope you will find this new feature useful. It makes it really easy to maintain translations of an open-source project hosted on github, and I hope it will help improving the translation quality of open-source projects.

Thank you for using Web Translate It.

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!

I just deployed a few improvements on the commenting system and on the string history page.

Improved Comments

On the project page

Comments on the project page are now grouped by thread, with the most recent comments on top.

Commenting on a string now creates a new “forum thread”, and viewing your comments and understanding how your project is going is much clearer.

But that’s not all: the comment’s status is also flagged for each thread: red if the thread has an answered question, blue if the thread has unread comments.

When you click on the link to read a comment, it will bring you to the comments section in the String History page, instead of on a specific comment page.

Comment your project

One new feature is the ability to comment on the project itself (as opposed as commenting on a string). When you click on “Post a comment” on the project page, a form appears.

This will be really useful to discuss about the projects without having to go to a third-party communication system.

Improved String History

The string history really needed some improvements. It just got more useful. It is now divided into 3 parts.

Latest translation

Which basically show you the latest translation made. From there, you can also translate and proofread the string.

Comments

A list of comments made on the string.

History

These are the changes in your translations over time. What’s new here is that the interface now displays the exact difference between the current version and the previous version. For example unproofread → proofread.

I hope you will enjoy this fresh round of improvements. Thank you for using Web Translate It!