The WebTranslateIt Blog

i18n news and Product Updates about WebTranslateIt

New in Web Translate It: Hide Strings

By Edouard on December 7, 2009

Quite often when translating a project, some strings added to the language file are not meant to be translated. Letting the translators know that these strings are not to translate is complicated. What about just removing them from the interface?

Managers now have the ability to hide these strings directly from Web Translate It’s interface.

To hide a string, it’s easy: from the translation interface, click on “options” and then click “hide this string”.

Hidden strings can be seen in the “Strings not to translate” category. From this category, you can also make a string visible to the translators, just the same way you hid it.

I hope you will find this very small improvement useful. Thank you for using Web Translate It.

Holiday Season

By Edouard on December 7, 2009

Atelier Convivialité’s technical support will close for christmas holiday from the 19th until the 27th of December.

Obviously, Web Translate It’s service will be open as usual, there’s no such thing as website holiday :)

Server migration completed

By Edouard on December 5, 2009

Following the server saga, the server migration worked without encountering any issues. Web Translate It’s service has been down for merely 20 minutes.

You should be properly directed to the new server by browsing https://webtranslateit.com. If you are not, you should see this page which will give you detailed instructions to flush your DNS cache.

You will notice a speed boost when loading pages, especially for the slow pages such as the translation interface or the API.

The previous server was a dedicated server, with a single processor having one core, and 1GB or ram. We completely grew out of this server, especially with regards to memory consumption. The server was running the whole website and only 1 worker, used for import/export of your language files, as well as miscellaneous resource-intensive tasks such as project deletion, search engine indexing and e-mail sending.

The new server is a Virtual Private Server from Linode with two processors having four cores each, and also 1 GB of ram. Surprisingly, the faster processors have drastically reduced the server’s overall memory consumption: this server can now run the whole website, as well as 3 workers and still have a comfortable memory overhead. With 3 workers, you will never have to wait long for your import or export jobs to complete.

Also, the memory size is now extendable: if Web Translate It needs more memory, I can resize the server and instantly get more ram. No need to change server any longer.

I hope you will appreciate the increased speed and reliability it will provide.

Maintenance window on Saturday 9AM-11AM GMT

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.

Downtime post-mortem: Tuesday 1st December

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.