Month: August 2011

Paragraph and sentence level spinning

We’ve received quite a large number of questions about whether Spin Rewriter is going to support paragraph and sentence level spinning as well. The reason for these questions is most likely the fact that paragraph and sentence level spinning is absent from the current Beta version of Spin Rewriter, primarily due to our 100% focus on the amazing context-aware word level and phrase level spinning that really sets Spin Rewriter apart from its competition.

However, to answer the questions: YES, of course Spin Rewriter will also support paragraph and sentence level spinning when it goes live.

This way everyone gets whatever they could possibly want. We’re really working super hard on this one and I guarantee you that it will exceed your expectations. 😀

When should we release Spin Rewriter?

We’ve been working really really REALLY hard on Spin Rewriter for almost a year now and we’re super anxious to finally … “set it free”. The Beta Program turned out to be an absolute success and with the feedback we’ve been getting lately we’re completely confident that we’re bringing a game changer to the market.

So, when will we release Spin Rewriter to everyone interested? We’re thinking of doing a quiet launch in the last days of August, maybe on August 30th. Should we do it? Time will tell! 😀

No more “Whoops, where did it go?!”

I wrote about a functionality that was requested by a couple of our Beta Testers about a week ago – our users demanded something that would prevent them from losing all their hard work if they accidentally pressed the “back” button or somehow left Spin Rewriter’s Edit Mode without saving their progress.

We just improved Spin Rewriter’s user interface and added what was requested – from now on you can no longer accidentally lose your progress. Whether you click the “previous page” / “next page” button, refresh the page, click on a link or close your browser while you’re in Edit Mode, you will be asked to confirm if you really want to do that. This way you can feel safe and happily click on everything you want, and you’ll never lose your hard work.

Try it out! 😀

Prevent users from accidentally leaving the page [JavaScript]

Sometimes your users might lose important information that they’ve been working on by accidentally leaving the page. They can either press the “previous page” or “next page” button by accident, or they can hit the “backspace” key on their keyboard, inadvertently click a link etc.

Luckily you can prevent them from losing their progress by using the following bit of JavaScript code:

window.onbeforeunload = function() {
    if (your_users_might_lose_their_work) {
        dialog_text = "IMPORTANT: Are you sure you want to leave this page?\n\n";
        dialog_text += "WARNING: If you leave this page, you will lose all your current progress.";
        return dialog_text;
    }
};

This code works perfectly fine with all modern browsers, with one small disclaimer: Firefox will not show your custom warning to your users, instead it will simply state “This page is asking you to confirm that you want to leave – data you have entered may not be saved.” However, that’s exactly what you usually want to say in this situation anyway.

What a lovely Sunday!

I couldn’t be much happier right now … Everything’s great, we’re making great progress, we’re getting ready to finally launch Spin Rewriter to the general public and I was relaxing at the beach, lazily checking my email inbox on this lovely Sunday when I received yet another brilliant testimonial from one of our Beta Testers:

I have been testing spinrewriter and its pretty damn good. Still a few tweaks to work out with some phrases that it creates but definitely better than anything I have ever seen.

We’ve been getting more and more feedback just like this one lately and we couldn’t be happier. Our unique approach is turning out to be exactly what we thought it would be, and we’ll be bringing the Number 1 Rewriting Software to the market very very soon.

Once again, stay tuned! 😀

Love you all! 😀

We’re getting a ton of suggestions – a big Thank You!

I just wanted to once again publicly thank all of our Beta Testers who are doing incredible work in helping us make a superb product!

We’re constantly getting great feedback and based on this feedback we’ll be soon be adding great little tweaks such as:

– While users are in the Edit Mode (actively working on their articles), they will be warned if they click the “previous page” or “next page” button in their web browser or they want to leave the page without saving their progress. What does this mean? It means that our users will never lose their hard work and all the rewriting progress they’ve done with their articles by accidentally pressing the “backspace” key on their keyboards which takes you to the previous page.

– Users will soon be able to select phrases that span over punctuation marks, e.g. they will be able to select the phrase “the red, white and blue” that they currently cannot and replace it with “the American flag”.

– Users will be able to simply click on the underscore (underline) of already suggested phrases to select them, instead of manually selecting them by dragging their mouse over them.

As you can see, we’re working pretty hard, so – stay tuned! 😀

Improved spintax fixing

We’ve just further improved our Syntax Fixer or Spintax Fixer, whatever you prefer.

As you probably already know, in the final step of the process Spin Rewriter changes “A {man|guy} ate an {apple|banana}.” to “{A man|A guy} ate {an apple|a banana}” to make sure that all indefinite articles are correct.

You see, the original syntax could have produced “A man ate an banana.” which is clearly wrong – the new syntax properly produces the sentence “A man ate a banana.”

With the latest update we taught our Syntax Fixer to differentiate between the ' character when it’s used as an apostrophe as opposed to when it’s used as a quotation mark. We believe it’s pretty much perfect now, hooray! 😀

Another big update

We’ve just rolled out another important update for the new article rewriting system Spin Rewriter.

This time we focused on improving the artificial intelligence behind it to make it understand your articles even better. We implemented two important additional natural language processing methods (our colleagues over at Stanford and Princetion have been toying around with them for a while now) and we couldn’t be happier with the results. Spin Rewriter now correctly understands over 94% of the tricky ambiguous words with many meanings, and 100% of all other words of course.

If you want to see it in action, sign up and become one of our Beta Testers! 😀