The homepage redesign aka "dashboard" is well underway. I've got the top portion as shown in this prototype screenshot pretty much done.

However now I'm unsure whether to update the site with an "incremental" update, or proceed with the "Lesson view" part of the dashboard. I'm tempted to do the latter, as I feel otherwise it may be confusing for users. I mean it will probably make a lot more sense to have both at the same time.

Implementing the Lesson View

The Lesson view is a bit of a challenge because I want to show the SRS status of flashcards, which is potentially lots of data (some lessons have 100+ kanji in them) - and I need this component to work - mulitplied by 56 lessons - in the new "View All Lessons" page (currently "Progress chart" on the top right of the homepage).

So I'm thinking perhaps I should implement a basic Lesson view with no SRS info in it, which is a lot simpler. Since the cards show kanji and keyword - I'll need to refactor the data that is already used on the Study pages - the kanji sequence as well as the keywords are dependent on the user's choice of RTK edition in the Account Settings !!

All of this would be much simpler if there were no multiple indexes. But on the plus side, having the code to support Old/New edition indexes means I can realistically add JLPT sequences in the future, and you;'d be able to switch between these, and the dashboard would show progress and lessons relevant to the user's choice of "kanji sequence".

Considerations for RTK Volume 3

Hopefully that makes sense. And this is how I would like to implement RTK Volume 3 support eventually. Right now the site handles RTK3 as an extension of the Volume 1 index. You can see a sample of the code here, we have basically 800 kanji from RTK Volume 3 lumped in lesson 57.

So there is a lot of conditionals in the site that deal with "if this index is <= MAX_KANJI_IN_VOLUME_1" then consider it is RTK 1, or RTK 3 etc. In the future I'll need to refactor this so that Volume 3 is an entirely separate sequence - and then for users who want to study RTK 3. the homepage progressbar will track progress along this track!

So that's how everything is always a bit more complicated : keywords for kanji change between editions/indexes (let's not even get into user's customized keywords), then index for any given kanji does not map to a fixed kanji / unicode point - it depends what the current "sequence" is.

So for the client side / front end side of things then, I need to send the relevant data, in an optimized way. Nothing really complicated, just takes time.

I'm excited to work on the Lesson View component though! In fact if you look at it the "kanji card grid" is very similar to what is currently shown in the Custom Review summary. So this "kanji card grid" view can also be used there. It could even potentially be used in the Manage Flashcards page for a more visual friendly way of editing cards, perhaps with a little "menu" icon on each card, to add/delete/edit a card.

So I think I'm probably just going to go ahead with the Lesson View even though I would have liked to do an incremental update at this point. Hopefully within a couple weeks I can finish this and do an update with a functional dashboard.

The "Progress chart" page, soon to be "View All Lessons" is another challenge to tackle. Here the user can potentially "expand" all of 56 lessons, each with SRS status for the cards. I have to look at the data and determine if it is possible to send it all at once, or if it's worth doing client/server calls .. which means less data sent in advance, but each time you want to look at a lesson there is that delay before the data comes in.

Hope you enjoyed this little update. Sorry it is fairly technical!