Beta Launched!

I am very excited to announce that Beta version was just launched a few days ago. From the onset, you may not notice many changes, but it's definitely more structured.

Another thing I did with Beta launch was to make it an open source. I wasn't interested in making any money off this project, and hopefully others see value in the service such that they may want to improve my code.

One thing that is still bugging me is the SLOWNESS of Google Translate API. Heroku says it can be solved by using background or delayed job, but I am not sure how it could help. I need to consult Heroku folks.

At any rate, please enjoy the site, and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Edit window fix for Windows machines

For some reason, edit window used to overlap original window when editing a translation only in WINDOWS machines, but not on Linux.

I finally found the problem and fixed it.

IE still can't correctly render YUI editor, so IE is still not supported.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Major code improvement under way

Today, a rails sensei pointed me to better way of coding, and Bloglation will be going through some serious code improvement. However, you should be able to continue to use it meanwhile.

There are also a couple of features that are added.

1. Ability to scrape Paul Graham's essays. He doesn't follow web standards, and thus Hpricot isn't able to extract information easily (like using
   
   for new paragraph instead of wrapping it with
   tags). I had to implement special hack just for Paul.
   
2. DB indexes and HTTP caching. In alpha stage, I don't know how much it would matter, but I am preparing for happy problems.
   

Private Alpha Launch!

I am very excited about private alpha launch for Bloglation!

As I wrote in the "about" section, I got the idea after trying to translate Paul Graham's essay called "Why to not not start a startup". I thought it would be easy using Google Translate or Yahoo Bable Fish, but I was surprised at how bad and wrong the translation was. Machine translation is just not quite there yet. And I also happened to find Ryan Tomayko's "How I explained REST to my wife" and multiple translations listed on the site. REST (Representational State Transfer) is such a key to all web development that I believe all web developers must be at least aware of it. There are many web developers all over world, and it's important that we all strive to write good codes.

Basically, when it is important to convey right message from one language to another, machine translation is just not enough and human involvement is required.

With Bloglation, you can make correct translation and save the content so that others looking for the same translation can read the correct translation. There is also wiki aspect, where any logged-in user can make additional corrections. With permanent URL, you can share your translation with others. I am hoping that Bloglation could be used in spreading awesome knowledge, idea and/or concepts across any borders.

Some caveats:

1. Bloglation currently works greatly with only Wordpress blogs (like TechCrunch). If you see something that's not working, please let me know. I am going to add more cases to detect more than just Wordpress. I will post them here as I release them.
2. You may encounter some bugs. I would appreciate if you could let me know via email or via "Feedback" link on the left. In fact, send me any comments or recommendations!

I am taking release early and iterate fast/many approach. We will see how it will work out.

Next up on my plate is getting Paul Graham's essays work so that I can start making correct translations on Bloglation.