Introducing Copycopter: let your clients do the copy writing | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Copycopter: let your clients do the copy writing

robots.thoughtbot.com

43 pointsqrush9 comments

FTA: "At this point, do you try to explain that your master branch has features that aren’t ready to go live yet? Do you create a new branch based on the previous stable branch, change your text, deploy that, and then back port the change to master? Do you tell him he’ll just have to wait until the next deploy?"

If you often have cause to think like that, something is terribly wrong with the way you work.

If I had more upvotes, I'd give them to this statement. However, I'd be surprised if there weren't a nontrivial number of Rails developers who totally identify with that. The service is laughably simplistic for my day-job environment, but it isn't aimed at us. For hosting a four-hour app on Heroku, that for whatever reason needs to be client-editable, it's great.

I went to the actual site without reading the introduction on the blog.

As a user who had no idea what he was about to read, here were my thoughts:

* The tagline below the logo is nearly perfect. Instantly told me what I was looking at.

* Gorgeous design. Love how simple the top section is.

* Plans & Pricing seems too prominent. I know you want me to click there so I can sign up, but ALL I know about the product is what I can guess from the tagline. I think you could remove it entirely (and make the "Next" button in the tour more prominent).

* I didn't really understand what was happening in the "Editing" screenshot. I wished the elements in the shot were labeled somehow.

* When I reached the "Viewing" screenshot, I only knew a change was made because I remembered the original tagline from a previous visit to Umbrella Today. I'm not sure it's clear otherwise.

* Plans & Pricing is gorgeous.

After that, I read the blog post, which gave me a much better overall picture of the product. It's written very well, though I'll admit raising an eyebrow at: "at this point, do you try to explain that your master branch has features that aren’t ready to go live yet?" This feels a little contrived. I think most folks know not to write long-running features in master, and I have little doubt that's how you're doing it at thoughtbot.

Just one guy's thoughts, though I am pretty squarely in your target market.

Anyhow, I'm psyched to see you guys launch this. It's clear you're scratching your own itch, and that's quite promising.

This is basically localizing your app from developerese into clientspeak, right? I would think a highly client-accessible Rails i18n solution might be even more useful.

I'm thinking in particular about tr8n, whose lead developer presented at the LA Ruby Meetup and blew me away with the level of work that had been put into the system by the team at Geni. The focus is on crowdsourcing your translations, and I can tell you that's not at all unrealistic with the capabilities it has. I did a site with Globalize three years ago and am just amazed how far a leap ahead tr8n is even without the crowdsourcing aspect.

I hadn't thought about using this for a monolingual site but now I can see the use.

http://www.tr8n.org/

>highly client-accessible Rails i18n solution

Great idea. I can see it now:

    ./config/locales/en-dev.yml
    ./config/locales/en-client.yml

Slap on a controller and some views to edit it and you're away. Gonna have to think carefully about security though.

This is great for static copy, but how is the performance? This could be an awesome plugin for something such as real-time edits to pages on a community site.

It won't affect production performance. It syncs copy in the background, so no requests to copycopter.com are performed during requests to the client application.

We worked hard to make sure it wasn't making lots of HTTP requests. The way the client library works is it runs a background polling thread and syncs to the Copycopter service every 300 seconds (this number is configurable), caching all the edited copy locally in the Rails app.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/copycopter_client

Great idea but should be wysiwyg.

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