A few tips on using the search box on the Study page:

• You can input a kanji (Japanese character), keyword or a Unicode decimal point. The latter is rarely used, but it can be useful if you want to enter a story for a character that is not included in RTK. For example 22000 returns a page for 嗰 "Unicode #22000" (these characters have no preset keyword).
• To get an exact match add a space character before you press enter. This will prevent the dropdown from auto-completing the search term. This is useful with custom keywords, as the dropdown does not include your edited keywords (it is a known limitation for which I don't have a satisfying solution for now) (edit: to be precise, an exact match will be found if there is one, otherwise the closest match will be returned)
• The index numbers, and auto-completion of keywords is based on the original Remembering the Kanji keywords. It defaults to 6th edition. 5th edition can be set in Account Settings > RTK Edition.

I've been busy updating old code the past few weeks. It's not glamorous, but when you keep a site running for so many years, it's part of the job ;) The main goal is to make it possible to do further improvements. At last, the personal story area in the Study page now uses modern Javascript.

While much is "under the hood" changes, there are two noticeable changes;

• Saving a story now connects to the server without reloading the page. You'll see a new "loading" indicator while the update is in progress. So a little better visual feedback and a bit more responsive.

• Display amount of characters left in real time when editing a story. Example picture. (Github issue #73).

Since I tweaked a bunch of old code, it's always possible I broke something. Let me know if anything's wonky!

A few small changes / fixes that I didn't document earlier:

• Fixed the auto formatting of stories whereby the first letter is made uppercase. It now correctly works for non-english characters. Closes issue #142
• (mobile) Fixed "due card" count in the SRS chart sometimes overlapped by bars (due to lack of space). The simple fix is the card counts should display on top of the bars. Closes issue #129
• Restyled the "Add to learned list" button, ditched the old image. Closes issue #92

In other news I just wasted 7+ hours of my life trying to update the Webpack build to 4.x, only to find out that it's not working properly in some scenarios and there are still open bu gs. Sigh. Its really frustrating when you develop a site like this, you've got say a couple hours in the afternoon and you think "oh sweet let's implement x or y" and then you spend hours with completely, utter nonsense and feel like you didn't do anything worthwhile.

Currently I am refactoring the Edit Story portion of the Study page to modern Javascript. When you click the Save button, it uses ajax and no longer reloads the page. If things goes as planned, then I would refactor the Shared Stories below. And then I would also make the search box area dynamic. When the user changes the kanji or index, the personal & shared stories would refresh accordingly. All in all it should make the page a bit more dynamic and make it easier