Tag: spinner

Improved design of the Archive page

December 4, 2018 / Aaron

We’ve just rolled out an improved design of the Archive page that makes it easier to keep track of all your spun articles.

The new and improved design lets you see more of your article before you even click it, lets you edit the article title in-place, and brings welcome changes and new icons to the control column of the article list.

The list itself has been cleaned up and no longer comes with visible black borders, and the Categories section now hints at the button it belongs to.

This design update required a number of other changes that were all carefully considered to ensure we improve the user experience for all of our awesome customers. Enjoy! 😀

Server migration successful

November 15, 2018 / Aaron

Phew!

That was a long and hard-working day at the Spin Rewriter office… If you can really call 28 hours of constant effort by everyone at the office a “day”. A huge thank-you to everyone involved, from server admins to our amazing customer support experts!

Even before we announced our scheduled migration to a newer server infrastructure on Monday, we had been looking into every possible way to minimize the downtime that inevitably comes with the migration. I believe we did a decent job… although the migration itself was still a major effort, and took a bit longer than planned.

You can read all about the migration with constant status updates here…

But now that the migration is over (and successful!), we couldn’t be happier about it!

Mainly for two big reasons:

1) We’ve decided to go forward with the migration for a good reason — namely, performance. And looking at the performance metrics that we’ve been running on our entire codebase ever since the migration, we can hardly believe what we’re seeing.

The new infrastructure absolutely FLIES! In some areas we’re seeing 400-450% improvements in speed, and that’s before we’ve even rolled out any hardware-specific optimizations! This is genuinely incredible…

2) Our previous operating system was only guaranteed security updates until the end of 2019 — which is fast approaching. We’ve decided to make the most of the inevitable downtime so we’ve taken the opportunity to update the operating system across our entire infrastructure. Truth be told, this cost us another 3.5 hours of service unavailability, but we believe the payoff will be more than worth it.

Our systems are now guaranteed full security updates until 2024! And as a geeky, techy, security-oriented person this makes my heart sing. 😀

You’ve probably already noticed the difference in speed and responsiveness when using Spin Rewriter — and we’ll keep on working really hard to make the absolute most of this big upgrade to our infrastructure. I’m sure you’re going to love it!

Server upgrade in progress…

November 14, 2018 / Aaron

Earlier today at 6:38 AM Eastern Time (3:38 AM Pacific Time) we’ve begun the scheduled migration & upgrade procedure.

This unfortunately requires some downtime of our website & API service which is the reason our website is unavailable at the moment.

To sum up our heads-up post on this migration, the procedure was proposed by our hosting provider, in order to move Spin Rewriter to an even newer & further improved infrastructure.

We’ve decided to go ahead with the migration and we’ve also scheduled a number of updates on our end for the same time frame. This way we’ll make the most of the downtime this procedure entails.

Status update (8:47 AM EST): The migration is currently proceeding as planned. We’re hoping to be back online relatively soon. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience!

Status update (12:26 PM EST): The migration is taking a bit longer than planned, mostly due to the immense size of our machine learning dataset that we’ve built over the years. We’re now rebuilding the dataset on the new infrastructure.

Status update (2:44 PM EST): The website is now back online. We’re now fine-tuning the back-end algorithms which still results in some spinning errors at the moment. We’ll keep you posted.

Status update (7:24 PM EST): We’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Most of the functionality is back online, including full functionality of the Spin Rewriter API. The web spinning process is still facing some sporadic issues, although we’ve already determined the cause and are working on resolving those issues as well.

Status update (7:46 PM EST): We’ve resolved the aforementioned issue. With that, we believe we’re fully back up & running. The website is now once again offering full functionality. The web spinning interface and the Spin Rewriter API are also fully functional once again.

Status update (9:17 PM EST): We’re now done with a significant part of our rigorous testing procedure that covers basically every aspect of the entire codebase. We’ve tested all features and user flows, and we’re also running performance analysis of the code on the new server infrastructure. The first performance results are incredible — we almost can’t believe what we’re seeing! 😀

Status update (6:12 AM EST): We’ve identified and resolved what were hopefully the last two remaining (very minor) issues that were affecting Site Guardian Pro and Rankings Done Right, but not Spin Rewriter.

Status update (9:21 AM EST): We’ve now completed our entire testing procedure which concludes this successful migration to a better, newer server infrastructure.

We’re soon going to publish another post with more details on the benefits of this migration. 😉

Bottom line: We’re now back in the saddle, and better than ever! 😀

Scheduled server migration (Wednesday, November 14)

November 12, 2018 / Aaron

In two days (on Wednesday, November 14th) we will be migrating and upgrading our Spin Rewriter servers which will unfortunately require some downtime of our website & API service.

The migration itself was proposed by our hosting provider because they want to move us to a new & improved infrastructure, and after a careful examination of the potential benefits we’ve agreed to move forward with the migration.

Before we agreed, though, we’ve performed an analysis of our usage patterns and determined that the best (or least inconvenient, if you will) time for a couple of hours of service unavailability would be early Wednesday morning.

We’ve also scheduled a number of updates on our end for the same time frame, to make sure that we make the most of the migration & upgrade procedure and the downtime it entails.

So — please expect a few hours of downtime on early Wednesday morning, and then we’ll be back stronger than ever! 😀

Bottom line: On Wednesday, November 14th, our website & API service will experience some expected downtime as part of a scheduled migration & upgrade procedure. We apologize for any inconvenience!

Improved design of modal windows

November 7, 2018 / Aaron

Time for another UX update — we’ve just improved the design and usability of modal windows (i.e. pop-up windows with additional controls) that you’ll encounter when using Spin Rewriter.

The new modal windows are more scannable, easier on the eyes, and easier to close once you’re done with them (they respond to clicking X, pressing Esc on your keyboard, clicking outside the modal window where applicable, etc.).

I’m pretty sure you’re going to love this update. 😉

New on-boarding animation for new users

October 25, 2018 / Aaron

As we’re conducting our UX tests and striving to make Spin Rewriter extremely easy-to-use, we’re always doing our best to keep our video tutorials & written explanations up to date.

Sometimes we even add a little “explainer animation” right into the user interface, especially if we think it will help our users discover additional features of Spin Rewriter that they might not know about.

Here’s an example of a new on-boarding animation we’ve just added to Step 2 of the spinning process:

It shows our new users how they can double-click a word to get the list of suggested synonyms for that particular word. And it also shows our users (very hands-on) how they can use their mouse pointer to highlight a phrase and get the list of suggested synonyms for that particular phrase.

Now, we know some of our users have known this for AGES — which is why we’ve also added a little twist to this animation. The animation will auto-play for new users for the first 3 days with us, or until they’ve used the highlighting feature for the first time.

Once they’ve used this feature, the animation will no longer auto-play. However, it can always be replayed by clicking the little “info” icon to the right.

And hopefully this makes Spin Rewriter even more friendly and easy-to-use. 😉

Spin Rewriter 9.0 is now LIVE!

October 4, 2018 / Aaron

Go check it out, right here:

https://www.SpinRewriter.com

The 9.0 version is an incredible update and I think you’re going to LOVE it! 😀

Happy 7th Birthday, Spin Rewriter!

September 14, 2018 / Aaron

We’re celebrating today — Spin Rewriter just turned 7! 😀

I 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 we were all incredibly ambitious and thirsty to prove ourselves. Oh, and everyone was (and still is) insanely hard-working. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a team spirit or enthusiasm like that ever before.

For me, launching the first version of Spin Rewriter was probably the most stressful time of my life — but also one of the most wonderful and magical times, all at once.

I remember being completely blown away as soon as the feedback from our first users started rolling in… Everyone was going absolutely crazy about Spin Rewriter, and within a couple of days I must’ve responded to more than a 1,000 of overwhelmingly positive customer support tickets. Those were some crazy sleepless nights for sure!

The reason that Spin Rewriter made such an enormous splash was quite simple — it 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 now that our ENL Semantic Spinning technology has advanced to something that’s way beyond basic meaning-extraction like that. But back then, in 2011 — the early beginnings of our technology were some TRULY mindblowing stuff for the time!

And for every single year of its life, Spin Rewriter has only gotten better and more popular. And what’s most important — our 100,000+ happy users have kept sending us incredibly positive feedback all along.

So let me take this simple opportunity to say…

To Spin Rewriter: Happy 7th Birthday!

And to our customers… You guys are THE BEST!

Spin Rewriter 9.0 is coming!

August 6, 2018 / Aaron

Remember my super hyped-up post from June? 😀

Well, we’re getting closer and closer to fruition… as all the hard work of the past couple of months has been paying off.

We’re well on our way to delivering an absolutely INSANE version of Spin Rewriter, and now we’ve finally got the DATE as well:

Spin Rewriter 9.0 is coming on October 4th, 2018!

You’ve heard it here first!

We cannot wait to show you what we’ve been working on! 😀

Minor API issues… (RESOLVED!)

July 27, 2018 / Aaron

As explained in our other API post from earlier today, we were noticing a sporadic 4-hour time difference between our primary server infrastructure and our API database servers, which was due to a recent update of our database servers.

This issue has now been fully resolved, which also means that the Spin Rewriter API is working flawlessly once again. Hooray! 😀

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