Go check it out, right here:
The 8.0 version is probably our biggest update yet! 😀
Author: Aaron
Just 12 short days until Spin Rewriter 8.0
I know! This is INSANE!
Spin Rewriter 8.0 is now just around the corner… coming out on October 18th!
And — of course, goes without saying! — all of our current customers will be getting a FREE upgrade to the brand new 8.0 version on October 18th, the moment it becomes available.
We can’t wait to show you all the improvements! 😀
Say “Hello!” to Braintree’s payment processing
As I’ve already mentioned back in May, one of the things that a part of our team was working on over these past couple of months was the following:
We wanted to replace the old and clunky payment processing setup that we’ve been using on SpinRewriter.com since 2011, and integrate something much more modern, flexible and user-friendly.
What am I referring to? Well, for the past 6 years, the only way of getting access to Spin Rewriter was going through PayPal. So, when you wanted to sign up for Spin Rewriter access and you clicked that button, you were first automatically redirected away from our website — to PayPal’s website. Then you needed to log into your PayPal account, click “Confirm” a bunch of times on the following pages, and then (hopefully) find a teeny tiny “Return to merchant” grey button just to find your way back to us. It was kinda… meh.
And then, if you decided to purchase one of our cool power-ups, like the WordPress Plugin and the WP license that comes with it, you had to do the whole dance again. Our website -> PayPal -> login -> click click -> hopefully find your way back -> done. Again, kinda… meh. 😀
So we’re all super excited to announce that we’ve now rolled out a brand new Braintree integration across the entire Spin Rewriter website. Here’s just some of the benefits:
- You can sign up for Spin Rewriter using your PayPal without ever having to leave our website. It all happens inside a user-friendly pop-up thingy.
- You can now also sign up for Spin Rewriter using your credit card, also without having to leave our website! You just type in the card details, and you’re good to go. This wasn’t (at all) possible until today.
- If you decide to purchase one of our cool power-ups, it’s as easy as clicking a button. You don’t need to repeat the entire dance, you just get what you wanted to get. It’s pretty cool.
- It all looks about a thousand times more modern and worthy of the year 2017. 😀
Oh, and — as an added benefit — we should be able to support additional payment methods in the future much more easily. So, if our customer support desk starts getting bombarded with requests for Apple Pay, Android Pay, Venmo, or Bitcoin support — we should be able to roll that out rather quickly, too! 😀
Go check it out — we’re really happy about this!
Happy 6th Birthday, Spin Rewriter!
It’s a big day today. Spin Rewriter just turned 6!
I still can’t believe how quickly they grow up… 😀
I remember launching the first version of Spin Rewriter like it was yesterday. The date was September 14th, 2011… and it was a beautiful, sunny Wednesday. Our entire team was absolutely tiny back then, but incredibly ambitious and insanely hard-working. I can honestly say I haven’t seen anything like that ever since. Launching the first version of Spin Rewriter was probably the most stressful time of my life, and also one of the most wonderful and magical times, all at once.
I remember being completely blown away by the feedback that we were getting from our first users… Everyone was going absolutely nuts about it, and within a couple of days I must’ve responded to more than a 1000 of overwhelmingly positive customer support tickets. Those were some crazy sleepless nights, for sure!
The reason it made such an enormous splash was, Spin Rewriter was the first intelligent article spinner the world had ever seen. Back in 2011, it was the first software tool that could tell the difference between “book” as in “novel“, and “book” as in “make a reservation“.
I know, I know… We take these things for granted nowadays, especially since our ENL Semantic Spinning technology has advanced to something waaay beyond basic meaning-extraction like that. But back then, in 2011 — the early beginnings of our technology were some TRULY mindblowing stuff!
And for every year of its life, Spin Rewriter has only gotten better and more popular… and the almost 100,000 active happy users have kept sending us incredibly positive feedback all along.
So let me take this simple opportunity to say…
To Spin Rewriter: Happy 6th Birthday!
And to our users… You guys are THE BEST!
Spin Rewriter 8.0 announced for October 18th, 2017!
That’s right!
We’ve just announced the annual launch of the next version of Spin Rewriter, version 8.0!
How crazy is that?
It’ll go live on Wedesday, October 18th, 2017… and we can’t wait to show you the insane number of upgrades that we’ve got in store for you. We couldn’t be more excited about this!
Keep an eye out for more details as we get closer to this date — and if you want to help us promote the upcoming launch, here’s the JV page with all the details. 😉
This is going to be awesooome! 😀
Spin Writer or Spin Rewriter?
As I’ve mentioned once before, it seems like a lot of our users out there are hoping that we would shorten our name a little… 😀
So, long story short: Spin Rewriter has always been called Spin Rewriter — why? Because it does spinning and rewriting, and those two words are practically synonyms — which is what Spin Rewriter is all about!
In a way you could imagine it being called { Spinner | Rewriter } or { Spin | Rewrite } … Unfortunately domain names don’t allow these curly bracket thingies, so we decided to go with Spin Rewriter. And we still think it’s a somewhat clever name, hahahaha 😀
Anyway, a lot of our users are calling the product “Spin Writer” instead. I know, I know, that extra “re” is a real pain in the *** to type. And that’s perfectly fine — we just want you to end up on the correct website either way! Which is why we bought the SpinWriter.com domain name roughly 2 years ago, and made sure that it redirects everyone straight to the actual SpinRewriter.com website.
And even though the alternative domain name didn’t come with a particularly low price tag (at all), it seems like it’s been worth it! There’s definitely less confusion now, plus we’ve already helped more than 21,000 people find the correct website simply by redirecting them. Hooray! 😀
Mobile friendly – check!
Spin Rewriter users seem to be a serious and business-oriented bunch! 😀 Why? Because even today, in 2017, we’re only seeing less than 5% of all traffic coming to our website from mobile devices such as smartphones.
The remaining 95% of our visitors are using either powerful desktop machines, modern laptops, or sleek tablets like the newest iPads… which means they all get to take in the full Spin Rewriter experience. Which is awesome!
However, should the 5% mobile users suffer for it? Absolutely not! I’m sure that all of us occasionally check our emails on the go, on our smartphones… and if there’s an email that looks interesting enough, we tend to click through to see what’s on the other side. So, at any time we can end up on a website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices and that either doesn’t load properly, or gives us a terrible experience. Which is NOT how we do things around here. 😀
With this in mind, we’ve just pushed out a further-improved mobile responsive = mobile friendly version of Spin Rewriter that guarantees an awesome user experience regardless of the device you’re using. We think you’re going to love it!
We’ve further improved JavaScript performance
With the vast majority of popular internet browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer / Edge, …) finally getting wide-spread support for some of the latest JavaScript features, we’ve decided to completely revamp our JavaScript code to bring it from the current “state-of-the-art” to absolutely “cutting-edge” status once again.
We’re always looking to squeeze every last bit of performance out of our code, be it with the back-end code that runs on our array of servers, or the front-end JavaScript code that runs inside our users’ browsers and helps them use Spin Rewriter to take care of all their unique content needs.
So, if you’ve noticed an improvement in responsiveness of forms / buttons / other interactive elements you come in contact with inside the Spin Rewriter control panel, now you know why. 😉 Enjoy!
Tired of the clunky payment process?
As I’m sure you know, the entire payment processing aspect of Spin Rewriter runs on PayPal. Yes, you can use a credit card through PayPal, but it all still goes through them.
Which is great — but our payment process implementation has stayed largely the same since 2011 and while it’s served our customers incredibly well, it seems a bit clunky from a fresh, 2017 point of view.
You know how you’re taken to PayPal’s website when you want to sign up for your Spin Rewriter access? Then you need to log into your PayPal account, click “Confirm” a bunch of times, and then find a teeny tiny “Return to merchant” button to find your way back to us.
And if you then decide to purchase a cool power-up, like our WordPress Plugin and the license that comes with it, you have to do the whole dance again. Our website … PayPal … login … click click … find your way back … aaah, here we go. 😀
In the world of Apple Pay, contactless cards and Bitcoins that doesn’t really seem to cut it anymore, does it?
Which is why we’ve decided to team up with Braintree on this!
We’re now hard at work to completely revamp our payment process, but here are the highlights:
- In addition to accepting PayPal, we’re now also integrating full support for separate credit card processing, right within our website
- We’ll be able to add Apple Pay, Android Pay, Venmo and other relevant payment methods super easily in the future
- No matter which payment method you pick, you’ll be able to complete the purchase right from our website, without being taken anywhere else
- When you decide to purchase a power-up, you’ll be able to do that with a single click instead of repeating the whole dance
- … Plus, it’ll all look a thousand times better. 😉
We’ve already got a lot of this working in our super secret Spin Rewriter development lab. 😀 And we couldn’t be more excited to bring it to you as soon as we can!
Optimized database maintenance
This is yet another update that might only be interested to the geekiest part of our customer base… but will definitely improve the lives of all of our customers, so it was well worth the effort.
(And yes, our engineering team has been on fire lately!)
Every software that deals with a database (of users, of synonyms, of articles, of categories, etc.) needs to make sure that its database and all of the tables inside the database are always in top-notch working shape.
Anything less than top-notch shape and you’re risking data loss, data corruption and possibly even security issues. And we’re always working crazy hard to stay not 1 step, but 20 steps ahead of all of these issues. 😀
This time around we rehauled the system we use for checking the condition of all our databases across our servers. Our previous system worked really well, however as the numbers of users/articles/synonyms in our databases kept on growing, it started to slow down the rest of our systems from time to time.
It was nothing too drastic, but in some cases our services became noticeably slower for about 20-25 seconds once or twice an hour. And our team was super happy to attack this not-even-an-issue-yet with all their technological might.
The new system is working like a charm, and the improved robustness and responsiveness of Spin Rewriter is something that I’m sure all our users will appreciate. 😀