Up, up, and away to Florida

We're ready and rearin' to head out tomorrow for Orlando Florida and the Chinese Language Teachers Association conference. We'll be gone until next Monday, but I'll try to keep everyone up to date with regular blog posts about our exploits in the warmer regions of the country.

Our primary reason for attending is to get more beta users and see what Chinese professors think of our darling. We've borrowed enough electronic equipment to rival an AV rental depot, and we set out on our 17 hour continuous car ride at 6AM.

And with that, I'm going to bed.

Kittens For All

Up until now, how things have been scheduled has been pretty simple. No longer! I've set up the beginnings of a dynamic scheduling algorithm that adjusts based on your own abilities. I'm going to see how it goes over the next week or so and then do tweaks, changes and overhauls periodically as I see how things go. And hopefully the more data I have to play with, the better I can make the algorithm.

Downtime tonight

We're taking the site down tonight from 1am - 3am EST (GMT-5). (That's Monday morning). This is for a bit of maintenance work and stroke order corrections.

[Update] The maintenance is taking longer than expected. I'll post again when we're back up.

[Update] Skritter is quite operational once more.

The Infant

I've put up the first version of the Infant, which is the audio prompt system. When you do the tone on a character, the Infant will pronounce it. If you're not scheduled to practice the tone, the Infant will say it when you're prompted. You can mute it if you don't want the wailing.

This is the first version, using some sounds donated by David Lancashire of Adso project fame. There are a bunch of missing syllables, but we'll be filling those out. We will rerecord the entire set at some point, to make it sound really good.

Maybe some day, we'll create a system for pronouncing the words, and not just the characters (or we'll find such a system that we can adopt). That'll be swell.

Some downtime tonight

App Engine got some upgrades tonight, which broke several parts of Skritter, since 9:00 p.m. EDT. We've patched it up locally, but there's still some troubles over there preventing us from uploading the fixes. I'll update when we're back online.

[Update] We're back online now, 11:14. Sorry about that, dear learning commandos.

More Funding

Well, for the past week I've been working on putting together a funding presentation for Lorain County Community College's Innovation Fund. Today we went up and gave the presentation and it went generally pretty well although there were a few things I needed to improve (note to self: don't make jokes about older people in a room full of people older than yourself). But our dreams were realized and we've been awarded a $25,000 grant from Innovation Fund to continue developing Skritter. This means a lot to us, and we're looking forward to working with the Innovation Fund staff to keep improving Skritter.

Most of the capital we raised will be spent on fundamentals: a Google Adwords campaign, print advertising, rent to give us more development time, and money to hire an intern. We had to cut the Ferrari and Malibu beach house for sustainability reasons, but hopefully we can afford those minor expenditures later on. :)

We're pretty excited about this whole getting more money thing, and maybe Scott and I will even be able to convince Nick to go out to the Indian celebration restaurant as a victory reward tomorrow.

Get Satisfaction

I'm mauling on bugs, adding tiny featurettes, and making things faster. Meanwhile, I've added a new feedback widget from Get Satisfaction, which you may or may not like better than the old contact page. Give it a shot, eh? Use it to tell us whether you like it or not, even. That'll show it.