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Blog / March 2026

  • 30 March 2026 Update to the Flashcard Dialog

    The Edit Flashcard dialog in the Study pages now allows to move new cards to the Restudy pile.

    This is useful if you want to skip a kanji for whatever reason. You can add a new card and move it to the Restudy pile right away. This will put the kanji aside while keeping track of your progress on the homepage dashboard.

    Flashcard Dialog

    Other changes

    The "Skip flashcard" and "Delete flashcard" options have been removed from the Flashcard dialog during reviews. I think these features were not useful, and I wanted to simplify the code.

    This update introduces a lot of refactoring under the hood. I finally removed the dependency to YAHOO's YUI2 library. That is a 165kb Javascript bundle which is no longer included in the page. This library was used on the site from ~2008 onwards. It is completely outdated. It is satisfying to remove it, and also allowed me to trim a bunch of obsolete code.

    YUI2 was used for the Ajax requests and the dialogs. I refactored ajax requests to use the Axios library, and i rebuilt the dialogs from scratch. According to the PR that's a good chunk of old code removed.

    Hopefully I didn't introduce any new bugs. I did plenty of testing including making sure that the dialogs handle connection issues gracefully when connection is spotty. Still if you see anything wonky please let me know!

  • 28 March 2026 Small fix to the Add Card button

    The notification (also called a "toast") that appears at top of screen after you add a flashcard was a little buggy. It would leave some kind of transparent layer that prevents interacting with whatever it was covering.

    After reflection I wasn't satisfied with how that UX works. I'm not fond of how it covers the top of the screen, even temporarily (especially on smartphone). I removed the notification. Instead the confirmation message is shown in place of the Add Card button for a short while, before changing into the "Edit Card" button.

    Also, お花見を楽しんでください!

  • 18 March 2026 Downtime today March 18 for Server Maintenance

    The website was down today for 30-40 minutes. This was a planned server upgrade from the web host, in case you were wondering. I was notified by email actually but I forgot to post it here on time. Sorry about that.

  • 11 March 2026 Custom Keyword size increased & UX improvement

    The Edit Keyword dialog now displays a count of characters left when editing a keyword.

    In addition the storage size for custom keywords was increased to 40 characters. It was previously 32, even though the error message when going over the limit mentioned "40 characters max", it would silently cut off keywords at 32 characters when you save.

    So now the limit is actually 40 characters, and the character count is shown so the custom keyword is saved exactly as displayed.

    I had a look in the database and there are a lot of truncated keywords. Those are typically from non-english users for example a keyword featuring the translation: "sign of the dragon (Zeichen des Drachen)". Another common reason for longer keywords is users who like to add the Japanese readings and sometimes Japanese words to the prompt.

    This closes issue #372 on Github. Thanks to Scott for bringing this to my attention.

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