JapanesePod101.com

Blog / May 2024

  • 20 May 2024Minor update : added Progress page to navigation

    The "View All Lessons" page (previously known as "Check progress") is now linked to directly in the main desktop and mobile navigation. This closes issue 172.

    I've only ever received one request for this, but then again why not.

    A surprisingly simple state of things that quickly gets more complex when you think about it.

    The site grew from the Study pages and the "Check progress" page was added as an afterthought.

    Today If I did things from scratch I would perhaps have the "All Lessons" as the entry door. While it could be daunting to see a huge grid of kanji, it could also be fun and satisfying to turn the boxes into green boxes for example. But it would also be jumping point to get into the Study pages.

    Right now the "All Lessons" page is a bit confusing to me because it does two things:

    • it CAN be used to navigate : when you expand a lesson you can click any of the keywords to jump to the corresponding Study page - however you have to expand any given lesson to do that
    • it shows your progress in the form of a sort of "progress bar" for each lesson - this is partly for legacy reasons, in that it mimicks very much the old "Check progress" page but now lets you peek inside each lesson

    On paper it sounds like a great idea if we had a huge "kanji poster" of sorts, but as you can see when you expand a lesson it takes a lot of space. If we had a grid as a sort of overall progress and navigation to the Study pages, I guess I would have to remove the keywords, and have them as a tooltip, so the grid can be more compact.

    Another issue is once you have such a entry page, is it takes a lot of space, and doesn´t really leave much space for dashboard as we have now. There would also be no space for the blog below.

    Still I feel like something is missing when navigating the Study pages. One idea would be some kind of powerful search popup, it might display a grid, and be filtered by "Restudy kanji" for example. The popup would need to be scrollable inside since it would be too long. It would have to be very compact as well with keywords only showing as tooltip. But I think that could be one way of ¨situating" oneself when moving through the Study pages, to have a better sense of the big picture.

    It's something I need to mull over for issue 339 whereby we'd want a way to navigate to the Restudy kanji while on any given Study page. Now I could have a popup for that on the sidebar for example, but it could also fit into the search I mentioned above. Think of it like a "minimap".

    Feel free to share some ideas you've had for the Study page. It might help me crystallize how to go about this.

  • 13 May 2024Site is back up!

    Sometime early morning CET this Sunday May 12th, the server ran into a major issue. Since this is a shared hosting I am not privy of exactly what happened but CPanel reported problems with insufficient disk space. This caused the database to fail and become unresponsive.

    Since this happened on a Sunday morning CET, it took some time for admins to fix the server. I couldn't do anything on my end but wait. Despite support telling me it would be up in 3 hours, I checked again Sunday around 9pm CET and the issues were still there. I hoped the server would be fixed by monday morning and thankfully I was able to restore the database this morning.

    On the good news side, I have now merged remaining php8 fixes (issue 335). We can now officially say the site is fully php8 compatible, hooray!

  • 2 May 2024Fix for broken study pages

    Yesterday I did a simple fix to restore functionality on some Study pages. Issue 332 on Github. Thanks Scott and David for letting me know!

    So it turns out the error surfaced after the server is upgraded to php 8.2. Over the years I did several upgrades of the code to php8 so I'm glad these were in place as I didn't expect the hosting to switch to php8 by default. Looking at the error it seems like it would have triggered on every Study page, if it were not for the fact that most pages have a cache generated to speed up the database queries.

    All this to say if you see anything odd on the site, things that may not work exactly as it used to please let me know.

    On the plus side, we are finally running on php8!

    I have been using the fixes from "FriendsOfSymfony"'s fork of Symfony 1. However I have not yet properly integrated it with composer so that's something to work on. I did some hacks of the way Symfony handles forms in the very early days of the site and this is why I have not yet added the php8-compatible fork of Symfony1 straight up as a composer package. The woes of maintaining code over a long period :) That said it shouldn't be very difficult to do.

    Basically for users the site works fine. On my end now I have a ton of "Such and such is deprecated" messages appearing in the development version. These messages are silenced on the live server.

  • 1 May 2024Tip: Adding multiple cards at once

    It's not very obvious on the website but you can add multiple cards at once. Say if you study #30-50 today, there is no need to add cards one by one on the Study page.

    Simply go to Manage Flashcards > Custom Selection and enter something like 30-50.

    If you study in order and don't skip any cards, then it's simpler : go to Manage flashcards. The default is to add cards in order. In which case you'd enter the maximum frame number, so in our example simply enter 50 and all cards up to #50 will be added.

    In both cases you get a confirmation step which shows all the cards that will be added.

    Adding cards in order is also an easy way to "plug the holes' if you have been skipping some cards you can just enter "50" for example and any missing cards get added - any existing cards are left untouched. No need to add missing cards one by one. This is valid also for any custom range of cards if you use "Custom selection".

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