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Blog / August 2019

  • 28 August 2019Performance issues... and what to do about them

    I am aware that the site's performance is degrading. The random lag can be irritating especially for the Flashcard Review area. Frankly it's been grating on me as well lately. I hoped these problems would go away but the web host doesn't seem to do much about it.

    Moving to a new server

    I don't have any quick solutions for this, but I think it's time to move to a new server. As I am not a server / admin expert, I think a good compromise would be to move to a fully or semi managed VPS hosting. I'd rather focus the time I have available on development than figure out all the ins and out of keeping a server up to date, secure, and whatnot.

    I've had a quick look and there are affordable VPS solutions. Some of which also come with the Let's Encrypt SSL certificates. Problem is I really have no idea what constitutes a good minimum pertformance wise, as to what is being on offer. Take Dreamhost's "Business" VPS Hosting: is 2 GB RAM enough? Is 30 GB SSD Storage sufficient? Are 2 Cores enough? How would that compare to a typical shared hosting?

    I created a new issue on Github: Move site to a new host. If anyone has experience with running some sites on a VPS hosting, please share any advice you have.

    Let's be realistic. If I do this on the weekends, I think it would be great if we can move to a better server by the end of October. It would be really great if we can do this before the end of September. So 1 to 2 months. I will try.

    Right now as soon as I have time what I can do is just sign up for a month and experiment a little bit.

    PS:for users of Flashcard Reviews, if the intermittent lag is becoming an issue -- and assuming you'd rather keep using Koohii, have a look at the Kanji Ryokucha app by porrukusu. The app may be more resilient because it lets you do reviews offline, and sync your answers later.

  • 25 August 2019Maintenance update #2 (improve browser support)

    Last week's update required some users to update iOS and even old Chrome versions on Android.

    Today I deployed a new build which restores compatibility with older browsers, in particular IE11.

    Supported browsers are: Chrome 60+, Microsoft's EDGE 15+, Firefox 54+, iOS Safari 10.3+, Safari (desktop) 10.1+, Samsung Internet 5+, Opera 38+.

    Those goes back at least three years! Essentially those are modern browsers supporting the EcmaScript 2015 features (caniuse.com). Browsers that are NOT supported include: Opera Mini (doesn't support many Javascript features, as you can see on that page).

    I've made a special exception for Internet Explorer 11. IE11 users still account for a non negligible 1% in July 2019 (stats). I know that people use Kanji Koohii at school and sometimes at the office, and in those environments they may not be able to just upgrade the browser, or even switch to EDGE.

    If you like stats, see Kanji Koohii audience stats 2019 on Github, with some screenshots from Google Analytics.

  • 18 August 2019Maintenance update today (update: temporary fix)

    Update August 20: had a couple reports so far that some functionality (ie. flashcard reviews, mobile nav) are broken with iOS Safari and even an old version of Chrome for Android. This could be a misconfiguration of the "browserslist" I used. Until I can issue a fix, please try alternate browsers on the device like Firefox or Chrome, and make sure they are updated. This should let you use the site until I can issue a fix.

    I just did a deployment today, after making a lot of changes to the website's build. Though these changes are mostly "under the hood", they will make any new feature updates easier and better.

    These changes should not affect the functionality of the site. Please let me know if there are any issues! (contact form or email kanji • koohii AT gmail • com ).

  • 4 August 2019Mark card as failed without having to flip the card

    On desktop (with keyboard shortcuts) you can now mark card as failed ("No" answer), without flipping the card first.

    (...) sometimes I remember the primitives (or "idea" of the primitive) and the overall story of a kanji, but don't actually remember how to draw a particular primitive itself. In these cases I want to mark the card as failed, but I don't want to see the kanji (...)

    Thanks to Betadel for the suggestion (Github issue #163).

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