Last week I was in Manila where I was lucky enough to attend WordCamp Philippines on behalf of Automattic (our parent company) and IntenseDebate. In case you’re not familiar with it:
WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.
I had a chance to speak to a group of around 150 Filipinos who are really into blogging (and WordPress in particular) which was a great honor and also great fun (I was the first speaker of the day!). My trip was rather timely now that we’re working to localize IntenseDebate, and it was especially fitting since a Filipino translation of IntenseDebate came in just days before I left!
Mozilla co-hosted the event, providing sponsorship as well of one of the speakers, Seth Bindernagel, Director of Localization at Mozilla. Seth delivered a presentation titled “A quick look into the Mozilla community through the lens of localization” which was right up my alley. I got a chance to talk to him at the event and will be spending a little bit of time with him in the near future to explore Mozilla’s approach to localization for projects like Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. As we continue forward with our localization, we will be looking at how we can take some of the lessons they learned and apply them to IntenseDebate.
By leveraging the experience of one of the biggest and most successful open source projects (other than WordPress of course!), we’ll be able to make the localization process easier for you and us, and make IntenseDebate a more “native” experience for everyone.
Please keep an eye on our blog for an upcoming post detailing the latest progress on our localization project.
And now to close out my post, I thought I’d share one of my experiences with the local cuisine: my first taste of a balut. (I’m the one on the left. 😉 ) Check out my full post on my blog.
Wow, you’ve really answered our call for help with translating IntenseDebate. In just 1 week we have received 49 volunteers translating IntenseDebate into 26 languages! And even cooler yet, Dutch, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and European Spanish translations have come in for review by your fellow Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s!
So far this has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve had the opportunity to be involved with. There are so many moving parts, it’s beautiful to see everyone coming together. Several languages have drawn numerous volunteers, and our Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s are collaborating and exchanging .po files from across the world. It’s super-cool to watch. 🙂
Here’s a sneak-peek at the French translation in action:
There’s still a lot that needs to be accomplished on our end before we can roll these translations out for use, but thanks to your help we’re making major progress! Please keep the translations coming!
So far we’ve received volunteers to help translate these languages:
Arabic
Hungarian
European Portuguese
Bahasa Indonesia
Italian
Russian
Danish
Japanese
Slovak
Dutch
Korean
Slovene
Egyptian Arabic
Lithuanian
European Spanish
Filipino
Malay
Latin American Spanish
French
Norwegian
Swedish
German
Persian
Turkish
Greek
Brazilian Portuguese
Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time! Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Ideally we’d like to have at least two Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s working together for each translation. Thanks!
We have a number of super-cool projects going on here at IntenseDebate, and we thought we’d give you a sneak-peek at what’s around the corner.
Localization
There is no question about it – localization is by far the most requested feature. We make a habit of listening to our users, and internationalization is almost here! If all goes according to plan, we will be ready to start rounding up multilingual folks to help us translate the IntenseDebate comments section (the bit that appears on your website) within a few weeks. Keep your eyes peeled on this blog for a call for volunteers.
Admin Comment Editing
Again, ask and yee shall receive. We’re in the final stages of testing a new feature that will allow you (if you’re a site admin of course) to edit the details of all comments on all posts on your site. No more letting your users run wild, unless you’re into that sort of thing.
WordPress Plugin Innovations: SyncRepair
One last tidbit that you may have heard on the support forums or around the place; we’re in the final stages of testing our sexy new self-healing comment sync, a.k.a, SyncRepair. SyncRepair looks for discrepancies between the comments stored in your IntenseDebate account and those stored in WordPress. If it finds anything that doesn’t look right, it’ll re-sync those comments and get you back in good shape.
This is only the tip of the iceberg! We’re working on our opus. Details to come…
You guys have helped IntenseDebate grow a huge amount over the past few months. Overall this is great! We love helping people take the conversation on their blog / website to the next level, and of course once you get IntenseDebate going you know you grow even faster. It has put quite a strain on our systems though. I’m sure you’re all aware of our outages over the last few weeks.
We’ve been working non-stop to address these issues. Our highest priority is improving the performance and long term scalability of IntenseDebate for you.
Now we could leave it at that, be completely opaque about what changes we’re doing and just hope that you’ll trust that we’re working hard on the problem, but you all deserve more and need to trust that our service can perform for you. So here’s a behind-the-scenes peek for those of you interested in how we’re tackling this problem.
The first major change we’ve been working on is sharding some of our larger and most frequently used tables into a more efficient and scalable database schema. For those of you not familiar with sharding it means storing all your data in several smaller tables instead of one large monolithic table. This allows us to get your data much more quickly and makes for a much more horizontally scalable system. (We can continue to add more tables to keep them small as our total data storage increases.) This is complete for our most heavily used data, comments, and will continue where appropriate.
The second change is creating more summary tables to simplify the retrieval of common data. Even after sharding some of the data is still too slow to compute on-the-fly. Summary tables cache frequently used computations which will allow us to get this information almost instantly.
Last, but not least, we’re optimizing our logging and background processing. We do quite a bit of logging to ensure things are running smoothly and to help debug quickly when things don’t. In particular the syncing process to and from WordPress blogs has a lot of activity we store for troubleshooting. We’ve done some work to make this logging faster and less system heavy, as well as some fine tuning of what and when we log in order to help ensure that these troubleshooting tools don’t have a negative impact on the performance of the core service.
I want to reiterate we’re acutely aware of performance over the last few weeks and there is no excuse for poor service or performance. We’ve fixed the most pressing issues, but we’re taking a number of proactive steps to ensure that we can maintain the level of service that you deserve from us. Thank you all for your patience and understanding.
IntenseDebate experienced some unplanned downtime earlier this evening. We have identified and corrected the issue and we’re back up. We’re happy to be back on schedule to deliver our next latest and greatest.
IntenseDebate - Official Blog 