Tag: Spin Rewriter

Latest updates on Spin Rewriter, our amazing article spinner.

Faster animations…

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. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Improved explanations of features

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. ๐Ÿ˜€

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! ๐Ÿ˜€ Go check it out for yourself…

Updated WordPress Plugin

Did someone say “lazy January”? Well, not for us… that’s for sure! ๐Ÿ˜€

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:

  1. You can download it as a ZIP file from the WordPress page inside your Spin Rewriter account, OR…
  2. 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. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Improved design of the Archive page

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.

Archive page - improved design

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! ๐Ÿ˜€

Server migration successful

Phew!

That was a long and hard-working day at the Spin Rewriter office… ย 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. ๐Ÿ˜€

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…

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 wasย 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 scheduledย 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,ย 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):ย 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! ๐Ÿ˜€

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):ย 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. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Bottom line: We’re now back in the saddle, and better than ever! ๐Ÿ˜€ย 

Scheduled server migration (Wednesday, November 14)

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! ๐Ÿ˜€

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

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. ๐Ÿ˜‰

New on-boarding animation for new users

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:
Spin Rewriter on-boarding explainer animation

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. ๐Ÿ˜‰