End of dry season?

Yes, this blog have been quite dry for the last couple of month. Things are progressing but slower than I hoped for.
Some things have happened with Transposh which might keep the reader interested.
The first one is that Nokia used Transposh in its official ovi blog, and later seem to have stopped. Really wonder why, so if anyone have a clue you are invited.
The second was the announcement from a startup called mojofiti, the startup which claims to have ~10 people involved in it has taken transposh and used it on top of wordpress mu to provide multi-lingual blogging service. They say flattery is the best form of imitation (actually the other way around, but who cares) so its kind of imitating to see one using your slogan and software to break language barriers ;) I think it would have been wiser to cooperate here so both parties would achieve more but no expectations.

The skies have finally opened where I live, I hope this signifies that the dry season is coming to its end and I'll have more news to tell.

4,000 downloads

I'll be reporting in multiples, so don't worry - next time is 8,000. It took two more months to get to 4,000 downloads yesterday. There have not so many releases in between, and the current rate seems to be somewhere around 20 new downloaders a day. The rating on the wordpress site has improved as I guess a few users probably read the how to donate section (mainly - vote your opinion of the project). I hope that as the summer vacation comes to an end, the release train will be back on track and that the new goal will be reached faster.

Focus

Its not very easy to keep going by yourself, but that's not the only problem. The problem I'd like to write about is maintaining focus and keeping on plan.
The original plan included raising money from VCs, which has failed and got reverted to plan B of doing it by myself. So according to the development plan I originally issued, we started with the wordpress plugin, and I guess that by now we probably have a few hundreds of sites using our plugin (a google search for transposh revealed over 1,000,000 results). The good thing is that we get lots of feedback. The problem is that some of it subverts us from the plan.
An example would be the usage of .css sprites for the flags used in the widget. This is a very nice feature, which is really nice to have, however it took me over two weeks in coding and testing (mostly testing) which were taken from more important features like advanced interface and more platform integrations. This delay will be carried for a long time, but I don't see a way to make sure that I keep focused (so many cool features to implement are requested).

Conclusion? none, focus is important, having fun is important. Balancing them is hard and tricky and I just hope I'l prevail

2,000 downloads

This is not an accounting blog, but I still like numbers ;) only one month was needed to double the number of downloads to 2,000 after passing the 1,000 goal, this was aided by the previously mentioned 100 downloads day. Still a long way to go, seems we are on a good track overall.

The first 100+ downloads day

The first version to cross this bar was 0.2.6 which did this achievement on the 17th of June. The numbers are adding up nicely and I am very happy of the progress that we have made in the last couple of months. There are active users with streams of bug reports and suggestion that are beyond our capability to handle at this point (although we are doing our best). Still – the road ahead is long and seems like its worth walking it.

1,000 downloads milestone

Today marks the 1,000 downloads mark for the Transposh wordpress plugin. Since the 0.2.0 release things have indeed started to move a bit faster.
However I did discover (yet again) a regression bug that crept back into my code.
I am staring the code for the client side of things, if this blog gives you weird alerts and errors, this is me at work :)
The google numbers now stand at 64,700 for the transposh search, the numbers were double that figure last week, and I guess they'll keep growing soon. Anyhow its much better than the 5 results transposh had before we started working :)

Winner of Startup 2.0

I am happy to inform my readers that Colnect, which was our beta site for our technology has recently won the prestigious European Startup 2.0 competition.

Amir Wald has presented Colnect to an enthusiastic crowd at Bilbao, Spain.

And was able to best the other 10 finalists with the following bright video presentation:


We at Transposh were very happy to be able to help Colnect get translated to 35 languages and believe that it was a part (even if a small one) in its recent success.