Client for Google Translate

It's been eight months since the first release of the client. Yesterday I posted a new version (4.3.332). For those who do not know, we are talking about a translator for Windows, which allows you to quickly translate in most applications, simply by selecting the text with the mouse. Translation is carried out, as it is not difficult to guess, using the Google Translate service. The first post . Translator site .

But I want to tell not about the possibilities of the new version, but about those not boring eight months of work.
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Little joys began literally a month after the first release - I received a letter from a person who introduced himself as a product manager at Google, who politely asked me to change the domain name so as not to mislead users. The fact is that initially I registered and placed the program on the googletranslateclient.com domain. The request was most welcome: I just conducted a seo campaign and put the program on 800+ download sites. Naturally, there were links to googletranslateclient.com everywhere.

It was agreed that I would take a month to move (so that Google would index the new site using a redirect) and then delete the old domain. And all due to the fact that I didn’t understand the clause prohibiting the use of the word Google in the domain name in the Google AJAX API agreement.

After the move, search traffic fell sharply, despite the “correct” redirect from the previous site and other attempts to minimize damage using Google Webmaster Tools . Times, commercials, in three. Still catching up.

A couple of months ago, Google gave another surprise: the API has changed. The changes were minor, but the client did not give out what was needed. I fixed it quickly, in a day, but it was not the best day of my life.

By the way, the second such day happened a couple of weeks later, when I began to receive messages from grateful users like “May you, bitch, die, and burn with a blue flame in hell!”, And in the languages ​​of the whole world! No, well, it happens that the program does not like it, but to wish for death ... However, the users' anger was explained: in the first "monetized" version I made a mistake that caused a reminder about the end of the demo period of the Pro version approximately every 10 minutes, although it was planned to show it's only five times in all 30 days, and then quietly switch to the Free version. I corrected too quickly, remembering movies where terrible negros poke needles in the figures of the main characters :)

A couple, not afraid of the word, paragraphs about hosting. After the release of the first releases, the standard tariffs have already begun to pop and they have been periodically disconnected for exceeding the load. The fact is that the client checks for updates at startup. With the growing number of users, these checks significantly loaded the site, although simple HTML was given in a few hundred bytes.

In the end, I decided to try VPS. This eliminated the problems with overload, but there were problems with technical support. The support’s favorite response was “so you connect via SSH and do everything as you need”. After the question “what is it?”, They helped me, of course, but the sediment remained.

But the biggest gift I received for the new year! By the end of December, my VPS was tired. Work half a day and lie down to rest. Of the tools that were available to me (SSH does not count), I had CPU usage statistics and the ability to send a request to restart the server. So, the download statistics told me that the processor was somehow puzzled about something, and the request to reload was executed manually by technical support people. And they were in no hurry to run from the holiday table to the reset, let alone solve the problem.

As a result, after several days of struggle, I just switched to a foreign hosting. Now I’m sitting on HostGator’s VPS - not a long time for assessments, a month has not passed, but one thing is clear: much more convenient. During the transfer, I never had to contact technical support and remember about SSH. Everything that I need is solved through the C-panel. Well, for the same money, I got savings on outgoing traffic. Roughly speaking, I paid our provider 1,800 rubles for hosting and about the same incurred traffic (excess outgoing foreign to outgoing Russian was paid). Now I pay $ 50 and do not think about traffic.

Another reason for switching to a foreign hosting service is the speed of loading the site for a foreign audience, and these are 94% of my users.

On the issue of speed. In the above mentioned Google Webmaster Tools there is a tool that shows the speed of loading pages. My site was made on my own CMS, rather brisk (well, there is simply nothing superfluous) and the phrase “your site is slower than 70% of sites on the Internet” hurt my feelings. First of all. I did not understand why. The site has only a few pages, the output was cached at the PHP level (that is, the once generated page was simply inserted from the cache). Pictures uzhaty to obscenity ...

It turned out this time is not enough. I had to shove all the pictures into one and use the technology of sprites, abandon all javascript-beautiful (and I had a script for 27Kb screenshots zoom), turn on all sorts of E-tags and give HTML to gzip. The result is an acceleration of almost 7 times (!) According to the Google tool. Now the pages are loaded on average for 1-2 seconds.

It must be said that all these episodes took place against the background of continuous work on the program itself and specifically knocked off the rhythm. Practically nothing remained of the first versions in the client, in 4.3 I got rid of the last rudiment in the form of IE components as a transport. But now the transfer is performed with speed that is incomprehensible to me. I hope users will appreciate it too.

Of the big tasks for the future, porting for Mac and Linux remains, I hope by the year, we will have new distributors. Many thanks to all for the feedback and criticism.