TLDR; I wrote an Open Source version of Copycopter’s server called Text Tractor. You can find it on GitHub at http://github.com/jellybob/text_tractor.

Update: I was asked by Thoughtbot to change the application’s name from it’s original one, so it’s called Text Tractor now.

The last couple of days I’ve been writing a Sinatra applications which I plan to use for managing copy on my client’s web applications. It’s not a full blown content management system, it’s just enough to allow clients to change the titles of pages and the like by themselves.

If you’re familiar with Thoughtbot then that might sound like something you’ve heard of before. If you’re not, you probably havn’t seen Copycopter, which is a tool with almost exactly that description, and a very neat client gem which synchronises your application’s translations with the Copycopter web interface.

When I tried it out I found that while I love the client, I was less then enamoured with the web interface, which I just couldn’t see most of my clients using… “What’s datetime.distance_in_words.about_x_hours.other, and why would I want to edit it?” they might say

I also wasn’t thrilled with the idea of paying them between $10 and $45 per month for the privilege of using it. Call me cheap if you like, but it just didn’t seem worth it.

Given that situation, and a couple of reasonably free days, I did what any self-respecting software developer would do.

I built some software that’s compatiable with Copycopter’s client gem, and I open sourced it. That may seem a little excessive to avoid paying a few pounds a month, but it did also give me the chance to try using Sinatra and Redis to build something larger then a toy project.

And now you can use it as well. You’ll find it on GitHub. It’ll run on Heroku, it’ll even run on Heroku for free if you don’t have that much data (and back it up, there’s no persistence guarantees on Redis to Go’s Nano plan). The web interface is a little rough around the edges still, but it does work, and it’s really quick thanks to PJAX.

Finally, I’d like to point that on the whole I’m a big fan of Thoughtbot’s work. I have paid accounts for both Hoptoad and App Trajectory, which I’m a big fan of. Copycopter I thought missed the mark though – the thought of going to a separate page for every translation in my application is horrifying to me.