To Each Their Own JuLiA

I was probably more excited than anyone has a right to be when we first launched our Wordpress plugin. It helped me meet two goals of mine. First of all, I had been wanting to develop a plugin or app for a while. The specifics weren’t set in stone, but the general outline was there. The second goal was to dust off my cobwebbed PHP skills. JuLiA for Wordpress is the first plugin of any kind that I have had a part in developing, and it not only dusted off my skills, but gave me an extra crash course in PHP. In short, it was fun and I’m proud of what we’ve done so far. The key phrase there is “so far.” Any developer worth his or ::her:: salt knows you need to iterate. We have plans.

To our dismay, we found out that many of our early adopters have non-English language blogs. Currently, JuLiA only works in English. Barring an all-caps “ENGLISH ONLY” note now attached to our plugin listing, there didn’t seem to be a lot we could do. Then, a couple bleary mornings ago, I found Microsoft’s live search translator API and tipped my coffee over in excitement. There is a chance that this might actually bear fruit…machine translation generally keeps the semantics of a phrase intact, but they are often out of order. This is a problem when humans are reading the results, but much less of a problem when you have a machine reading. Anyway, it’s a possibility…if this ends up being a dead-end I’ll look elsewhere.

Besides the issue of us existing in a multi-lingual world without a multi-lingual product as yet, we also realize we need to train a more generalized version of JuLiA for your average blogger. The current version has been trained on the semantics of political blogs. We recognize that not everyone is posting lengthy diatribes about Obama’s stimulus plan and need to account for that.

We also want to give individual bloggers more control over their particular version of JuLiA. Like larger publishers, they should be able to customize JuLiA to their subject matter and definition of abusiveness. Right now we do all the customization for our larger customers and it just isn’t scalable for us to train versions for everyone. So the other big addition is going to be a sort of “for each their own JuLiA” functionality. At this point we’re not sure if everyone will get their own JuLiA for free or whether people will have to pay a small fee to customize her. Much could happen between now and the next release to influence our decision, but we’ll keep you updated. Needless to say, we’re always thinking about ways to make her better.