Tag: update

Our WordPress Plugin – updated!

July 11, 2019 / Aaron

We’ve just rolled out an important update to our official Spin Rewriter WordPress Plugin… which lets you:

automatically spin & republish old posts,
automatically fetch new unique posts,
spin your posts right inside your WordPress admin panel,
connect your websites for 1-click remote posting from Spin Rewriter,
and more…

The updated version of the plugin now brings full Gutenberg compatibility.

What’s Gutenberg? That’s the name of WordPress’s fancy new text editor — you know, the one that splits all your posts into editable blocks.

Make sure to grab the newest version of our plugin, by either:

Downloading it as a ZIP file from the WordPress page inside your Spin Rewriter account, OR…
You can go to the “Plugins” page of your WordPress admin panel and then click the blue “Check for updates” link next to the Spin Rewriter plugin.

Either way you’ll be up and running (with the newest version) in no time. 😉

All-encompassing code update

April 23, 2019 / Aaron

Today is a big day for Spin Rewriter — even though it may not seem like it.

20 minutes ago we rolled out a huge update to our entire codebase. Through a massive multi-month code refactoring effort we’ve made our code more streamlined, more maintainable, more readable, and vastly more future-proof.

Fun fact: When we deployed all this new code to our servers 20 minutes ago, more than 90% of all files containing code were updated.

In the process we’ve also eliminated over 1,100 lines of code.

Wait… Less code? Doesn’t that seem like a bad thing?

There’s a brilliant quote attributed to Bill Gates: “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.“

I think that’s an absolutely brilliant way of putting it. By making the code more compartmentalized and more reusable, we were able to significantly trim down the amount of code required in total.

And even though Spin Rewriter was running on great code before, with this latest update the code is downright beautiful. There’s another relevant quote:

“Code is poetry.“

Here at Spin Rewriter we believe that 100%, and with every update we make sure we’re delivering a better, faster and more robust user experience to our awesome users. Cheers! 😀

Serving pages through HTTP/2

April 16, 2019 / Aaron

This morning (well… extremely early morning, at 3 AM New York time) we rolled out another important upgrade to our front-end servers.

What do we mean by “front-end” servers? These are the servers that are actually serving the Spin Rewriter website with all its subpages to our awesome customers like yourself.

For contrast, the “back-end” servers run the actual ENL semantic spinning algorithms and do all the heavy lifting in terms of running the machine learning models, neural networks, selecting good synonyms given the context of your article, etc.

Anyway, our front-end servers have now been upgraded to support HTTP/2. That’s the newest reliable version of the protocol that’s used for communication between servers and web browsers (e.g. Chrome or Firefox or Safari).

As a result of this upgrade, the entire Spin Rewriter website will load even faster and feel even snappier. I think you’re going to like this upgrade. 😀

Quick Buttons – explained!

April 7, 2019 / Aaron

If you’ve been doing any manual spinning with Spin Rewriter (and not just relying on our magical One-Click Rewrite technology, haha), you’ll know that there are 3 little buttons just above the list of synonyms for each word or phrase.

Those buttons are called – “Top”, “All”, and “Apply to All”. They’re the bext way to speed up a manual rewrite of your article.

The “Top” button selects all reliable (top) synonyms of the current word that meet one of your three available One-Click Rewrite settings: more readable, recommended, or more unique.

The “All” button selects ALL synonyms of the current word. A second click of that same button then removes all synonyms.

Finally, the “Apply to All” button applies the selected synonyms of the current word to every occurrence of this word in your article. It also pluralizes or capitalizes the newly-applied synonyms where required.

Example – Let’s look at these button in practice:

When selecting the word “book” in your article, you’ll see a list of available synonyms.

Clicking “Top” will automatically select the best synonyms, for example “novel” and “magazine”.

Clicking “Apply to All” will then automatically add these 2 top synonyms to every single occurrence of the word “book” in your entire article. It will also capitalize or pluralize those synonyms as required (e.g. it will use “Novels” as a synonym of “Books” instead of “novel”).

All of this will let you manually rewrite your articles MUCH faster, and with even better results. Enjoy! 😀

Faster animations…

February 26, 2019 / Aaron

It’s always been our goal to make Spin Rewriter as enjoyable to use as possible.

With this in mind, we’ve spent a large chunk of time recently rewriting our front-end (customer facing) codebase to be even more streamlined and more performant.

As a result, the user experience inside your Spin Rewriter account has become significantly more fluid. All animations are now happening more quickly, letting you know that your actions are taking effect immediately, while also providing lovely UX feedback.

We think you’re going to love the changes. 😉

Improved explanations of features

February 11, 2019 / Aaron

We’ve been losing no time lately — today we’ve rolled out another update that significantly improves the user-experience of Spin Rewriter users.

Spin Rewriter is (in itself) an advanced natural language processing tool, and as such its underlying technology contains a staggering amount of complexity. And it’s always been our job to make Spin Rewriter not just extremely powerful, but also just as easy-to-understand and easy-to-use.

Our users are telling us that we’re doing a good job with that, and that they vastly prefer using Spin Rewriter to other competing article spinners… but we believe we can always do better. 😀

So we took on the gargantuan task of combing through every last piece of text inside the user interface (that you see after logging into your Spin Rewriter account), and rewording those texts wherever necessary.

We spent countless hours contemplating various options to describe features, to tell you what each button is going to do, and to make sure you always feel 100% in control of the software.

I believe we’ve done a good job! 😀 Go check it out for yourself…

Updated WordPress Plugin

January 16, 2019 / Aaron

Did someone say “lazy January”? Well, not for us… that’s for sure! 😀

We’ve just rolled out an update to the official Spin Rewriter WordPress Plugin… you know, the one that lets you:

automatically spin & republish old posts
automatically fetch new unique posts
spin your posts right inside your WordPress admin panel
connect your websites for 1-click remote posting from Spin Rewriter

The updated version of the plugin comes with improved functionality, a more robust process of re-publishing old posts, a minor bugix, and ensured full compatibility with Spin Rewriter 9.0.

You can grab the new version of the plugin in 2 ways:

You can download it as a ZIP file from the WordPress page inside your Spin Rewriter account, OR…
You can also simply go to the “Plugins” page inside your WordPress admin panel and then click the blue “Check for updates” link next to the Spin Rewriter plugin.

Either way you’ll be up and running (with the newest version) in no time. 😉

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! 😀

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