TM-Town has been chugging along at an alarming rate (from a developer’s standpoint) for the last few months.

And while that means lots of new features and better user experience on many areas of the site, Kevin and I, only being a team of two, have been hanging on for dear life!

One place the new features had amassed to a critical level was on the User Settings page...

It was seriously turning into a mess!

So we finally found some time to turn our attention to making the user settings page much easier to update and navigate.

I’d like to walk you through some of the things that have changed, but hopefully it’s pretty straightforward.

Here’s the short version of the updates:

• Current Plan Usage
• New Badges and Badge Generator
• Visual Profile Editor
• Nakōdo Settings (much easier to find!)
• User Preferences
• Connected Applications

Say hello to the new and improved User Settings

As you can see in the photo above, the page now has navigation on the left side that makes updating only one section at a time a snap. If you need to update multiple sections, however, you can also do that!

When you edit something on this page, an update button will appear fixed to the bottom of the screen.

You can switch tabs, close popups, and edit anything on the page without losing your work, but don’t navigate away from the page without clicking on ‘Update’ at the bottom. In that case, you will lose your changes.

Here’s each tab explained in more detail.

Current Plan Usage

This is a visual look into your current usage. We have three plans: Basic (free), Starter, and Professional. You can see the details of each plan here.

Monitor from this view how many alignments, documents, searchable segments and terms you have left. Manage your subscription or upgrade when necessary.

Badge Generator

We also created new badges, and made choosing the style and size that’s best for you really simple.

These badges show your name, as well as the number of translation units and term concepts you’ve uploaded, if any. They’re great for putting on other profiles or on your personal website. This will make sure as many people as possible are seeing your beautiful TM-Town profile.

In addition, Dmitry at The Open Mic has recently added the ability for TOM users to show their TM-Town badges on their profiles.

Visual Profile Editor

Having a well developed, professional profile is a must, and we took a big step in making it easier to see what you’re not showing that you might want to.

From this tab, you can change your profile theme color, background image, and user photo.

You can also update your basic info, add education, translation association memberships, payment information, CAT tools you use, as well as link social media and other translator portal profiles.

In addition to the above, we’ve also added the ability to sync RSS feeds to your blog(s)! This is really cool because you can show up to three of your latest posts, across multiple blogs, right on your TM-Town profile.

By linking to your blog, you not only will get more exposure for your writing, potential clients and other translators will see you as even more of an expert.

If you’re not blogging about translation yet, The Open Mic is a great free platform where translators can be heard by their peers. If you know about the blogging platform, Medium, The Open Mic is basically Medium for translators.

And just like any other RSS feed, you can easily add your Open Mic feed to your TM-Town profile.

Here’s what your Open Mic feed URL should look like: https://theopenmic.co/author/(your-username)/feed

Just enter your username above!

Nakōdo Settings

Nakōdo is what really separates TM-Town from other platforms. Nakōdo is a search engine that takes sample text from a client, and finds the most qualified translators for that content based on prior work each translator has loaded into TM-Town.

Nakōdo works like a virtual assisant to introduce clients to you - “Fred, this is Rosa, an amazing translator if you’re needing XYZ translated. I know her prior work, and it’s right in line with what you need done.”

We believe this will eventually make finding translators online much more organic, and much more like a personal referral in the real world.

For something this important, it was a little buried on the old settings page...

So now, it should be pretty easy to find, and make sure that you’re being listed in Nakōdo search results.

User Preferences

On this tab, you can change your username, email, or password.

You can also update your notification settings, or delete your TM-Town account.

Connected Applications

As you were probably aware, your TM-Town account can be connected from within CafeTran.

What you may not be aware of is that we have also released our SDL Trados 2015 plugin. Learn more about the plugin if you are an SDL user.

Let us know in the comments which CAT tool you’d like us to work on next!

And... That should just about cover everything!

If you have any questions, though, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.

And if you haven’t worked on your TM-Town profile in a while, now would be a great time to go add some more details, connect your blog posts, and paste your new badge around the web!