Easyling Release Notes February, 2021

This month was mostly business as usual. As such, we’ve been particularly productive. We finally moved the Advanced settings and Export sections to the Dashboard 2.0. We also improved many existing features such as importing content back from Dropbox and other External Translation Management Systems. Read the full article for the details.

Advanced settings

The most important section is finally here! For quite some time now, it’s been the last reason to go back to the old Dashboard.

The new and redesigned Advanced settings has all of the options the old version had but we also added lots of new ones that we’ve been testing internally. We split the Tweaks section into 3, we organised them, we added descriptions, and we added new ones.

Translation settings

These tweaks are used to ensure that the site is fully captured. If something isn’t picked up by default, it’s always a good idea to take a look at these. If it ever came up before, we likely created a solution for it and it will be available here.

Serving settings

These are the options you can use to ensure that the live site is published as needed. Options for cookies, headers, and request handling can be found here.

Miscellaneous settings

Find the rest of the options that don’t really fit in the above 2 categories here.

This is a huge step in our goal of fully modernising the user interface. We are getting very close to finally removing the old Dashboard that’s only been causing headache lately.

Export

One of the last missing sections on the Dashboard 2.0 was Export. We finally did it. As an added benefit, we made sure that the options are consistent between Export and Work package generation with export.

Improved automatic imports

We used to submit one single file (a .zip) to the external translation management systems for translation and expected only one. Some ETMS systems returned with multiple files (e.g. the XLIFFs were not packed into a single .zip file). We added support for this case.

Additionally, when importing multiple files from Dropbox at the same time, the temporary filenames clashed occasionally. We now add a randomly generated suffix to these files to avoid this.

Gateways

Gateway settings used to be exclusive to the support team. The option is now exposed to every project owner. Look for it on the Miscellaneous options card on the Project overview. Gateways are used to route requests that the proxy makes through a static IP address (as opposed to one that the underlying infrastructure happens to provide).

The crawler is a bot so some firewalls block it. This often results in a crawl that finds no new pages and at most a few words that say something along the lines of “you are a robot, we blocked you”. In such cases, a gateway can be set up. As a result, every request will go through a static IP that can be whitelisted in the firewall settings. We currently offer 2 gateways, one in Europe and one in the US. The only difference is the location, please select the one closest to the client’s server(s) and the expected location of visitors.

Note that it’s not recommended to enable a gateway unless there is a reason to do so. As it adds an additional hop to the request’s route, it can increase latency slightly. Additionally, some firewalls block IP addresses if there is a large number of requests coming from them. If you enable a gateway, all of the requests from the proxy (i.e. every visitor loading the translated site) will come from the same static address which can quickly get it blocked.

Additionally, the gateway can affect server-side analytics. It masks the original IP address of the user. All requests will arrive from the same location, that of the gateway. To combat this, we use the X-Forwarded-For header to pass on the original IP. Make sure to take this into consideration when configuring your analytics.

Other improvements

• Resource URL swapping can now be turned on for externalized pages as well

• Custom domains are now supported for custom XTM instances

• When publishing translation under a sub-directory on the same domain, a slash sign used to be enforced at the end of the sub-root. Now if the tweak is turned on, the sub-root without a slash sign at the end will be served. This way, you can serve your home page in Spanish on example.com/es instead of requiring example.com/es/

• If the original server produces an invalid charset while proxy serving, the proxy attempts to correct it instead of throwing an error.

• A notification is provided when your wallet is running low or if it’s about to expire