JapanesePod101.com

Blog / February 2009

  • 21 February 2009Find a top Assistant Language Teaching (ALT) job in Japan

    Today I am glad to introduce ALT Directory, a new sponsor that helps you find ALT jobs in Japan, a new venture from our long time member synewave (also known as Andrew ;) ).

    At ALTDirectory.net, Andrew provides "an email subscription service advising prospective Assistant Language Teachers (ALT) of jobs working directly for local Japanese Boards of Education (BoE)."

    You can see Andrew put heart into his website, and I thought you may enjoy the articles he's written about the ALT life in Japan.

    ALTDirectory is the second sponsor on Reviewing the Kanji. Andrew was a very early supporter of this website and used to be very active on the community forums as well, so I naturally wish him all the best with his new enterprise!

  • 15 February 2009Refactoring progress

    The website re-write is going along nicely. I'm about 2/3 done now and today I finished the basic features for a "backend" application.

    I still have to tackle the Review and Study pages, but as I get more accustomed to the MVC approach, and have improved the framework some more, I expect that the rewritten Study page will be easier to do than it looks.

    Instead of a big flat file and some classes there will be a true layout template, itself making use of "slots", "partials" (template parts), and "components" ... much more modular and maintainable.

    Until now I had some administration features, such as editing news posts, as part of the main site. Having a completely separate "backend" application is much better now as the administration parts do not rely on the main site style and layout, I can edit the main site's design without worrying about breaking the admin parts. The backend has basic CRUD features to create and edit entries in the database:



    This CRUD doesn't use "scaffolding", which is the generation of form code, but instead generates a configuration at run time based on the database meta data for the tables; and then passes that configuration to the "data table" component which you may already have seen in the Trinity website.



    Since the backend uses the same authentication features as the main site, I will be able to add more "credentials" and allow other people to help me manage parts of the site in the future (perhaps moderating the Study area, or editing content in the next version of Trinity).

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