New Feature #2: Custom Lists!

Yes, they are finally here! You can now create your own lists with whatever word or sections or traditional variants you want. I've built a few of the custom lists that were being put together in a google doc, and we'll put the rest of them up shortly (unless of course you want to beat us to the punch!). Go check out the new tools.

There are a few key things that have been put into the first version of this system.

First: the lists can be published and shared with others. You don't have to publish them, you can just keep your private collection of lists for your own usage, but we hope you'll share the ones you like with other users!

Second: you can 'remix' any list. Simply go to that list's page and click 'Remix' and a new draft will be made pre-populated with that list's words. You can take another person's custom list and make a new version of it with more words or a different organization or whatever you'd like.

Note that you can make remixes of textbooks (say for teachers who want to make tailored lists for their classes) but the system is a bit slow with such large lists. I'll be trying to figure out ways to improve its efficiency, but for now if you choose to remix a large list, I recommend a browser with speedy Javascript!

Third: remixed lists that are published are associated with one another so that people can easily see new or competing versions of a list. We hope that this will encourage people to collaborate with one another, building off each other's improvements, and generally making better and better lists. It will also help keep lists organized by building them as version trees.

Fourth: For the sake of stability, published lists are immutable. We don't want lists used by many people to change. You can edit lists that you made that are unpublished (and that you may be studying), but once they're published you'll just have to remix a new version.

There are of course more ways we can organize these lists. I'll be putting in a search engine soon so that you can search the custom lists just like you can search forum topics. And perhaps later we'll add tagging and rating systems as needed to further organize things. But I wanted to make sure the remixing system was in place first to see if it will be effective.

Also, besides the new custom list system, the vocabulary lists page has been upgraded to help give users an overview of the vocabulary sources available to them. Many people didn't know we had a queue and what it was for, so this should help.

All right, make some lists!

Twitter tie-in, reminders

You've asked and it is delivered: Skritter can now tweet your progress for you. Head over to the new reminders page to set it up, if you use Twitter.

"But why would I want Skritter on my Twitter, because despite the names they confusingly seem to have nothing in common?" you ask. Three reasons: to show off how fast you're learning; to let your Chinese-studying friends know what they're missing; and to set public goals for yourself.

I've got a hunch that the publicizing of progress in this way will help you stay on the practicing wagon. I think this because I just finished building it, turned it on for my Twitter account (nwinter), realized that it was soon going to tweet that I had only practiced for 20 minutes in the last week, and immediately started practicing again so I wouldn't look like the total slacker that I am. Fortunately, Skritter didn't mind too much, as 30 minutes took care of my review queue and I'm back on track.

I've also set it up so that Skritter can privately email these reports to you, as a first step in planned goal-tracking schemes. This is all very first-draft, experimental sort of stuff, so we need a lot of feedback on this. How would you want reminders to work? What would you want them to say? What other services would you like to feed your Skritter progress to? What about goals--do you want goals on time spent, characters learned, words learned, days practiced in a row? Let us know in the comments or on this forum thread.

Note: we might premium-ize parts of this, but that'd happen much later.

Pollswagger, open scratchpad

I've written our own poll system to replace the previous one we were trying. It's accessible from China, it's better styled, and it doesn't even forget your vote every five seconds!

There will also soon be a page to view old polls, so you can learn more about your fellow Skritterers' favorite Chinese tones and how many have sprung for the Wacom and stuff, even after the poll has changed.

We're now opening the scratchpad up so that you don't need to be logged in to use it. So go ahead and make links to sets of characters you want to reference (using the urlencoded URLs if you want IE to be able to open them). If you want to generate the links for integration into your site, though, please talk to us first.

I've recently caved and changed it so that the timer stops when you finish a prompt, until you start the next one. I haven't crystallized the time tracking system into a gleaming power nugget yet, but maybe this will help for now. Let me know whether it works better for you. I've heard one suggestion to have it count a couple seconds after you finish a prompt, but I'm unswayed: what do you think?

Crazy Chinese Dream

So last night my subconscious transported me to China of old. My closest guess is that it was several hundred years ago. By some stroke of terrific luck, I was part of the royal court and the empress was going to give a speech to her subjects. But our empress was afraid to appear in front of so many people for security reasons and her guards couldn't guarantee her safety, so they set about looking for a body double who would brave the slings and arrows of a potential malcontent for her majesty. I happily volunteered myself to be her body double, and followed her courtly entourage into the speech-giving-waiting chambers. I guess they were the feudal equivalent of a TV set's waiting room. There I was decked out in a royal red kimono (I know, I know, not really consistent) and told that the only thing I would have to do is appear before for the people and preside over the proceedings. I was forbade from showing my hands because for some reason my hands would reveal me to be an impostor and the gig would be up.

At the last moment, I buried my hands into royal red sapphire folds of kimono fabric and daintily ascended the stairs to a platform surrounded on all sides by seething, roaring masses of Chinese people. The setup was like the Superdome, only there was no field, only a small raised platform upon which I and several other dignitaries stood. I nodded sagely, fulfilling my body-double cross dressing duties, and the ceremony got underway.

But what was this?! A dignitary approached me and asked me expectantly to give the opening address for the festivities. This hadn't been in the job description. The crowd roared and I looked down onto a sheet of vellum densely populated by characters I had never seen before, with unreadable pinyin underneath. The pinyin was dream-writing so I could sort of understand it, but the letters kept changing, making the syllables un-utterable. What's more, I felt that my Chinese professor from Oberlin (Ma Laoshi) was standing close at hand frowning at the thought of me reading pinyin. Her frown was enough to make me try to read the characters.

"Shooooo uannnngggggg . . . . daaaaooooooo . . . ."

The dignitary holding the speech was clearly embarrassed for me and I couldn't figure out why nobody could tell that my deep voice wasn't that of the empress. The dignitary started mouthing the pronunciations, but it was unintelligible.

The crowds were veritably bathing in my palpable embarrassment as I mangled syllable after syllable, grinding out incomprehensible Chinese as the visage of Ma Laoshi's disappointed face appeared to my dream self.

Finally one of my friends on the platform (who were all very uncomfortable by this point) came near and whispered that he could take over. I was so relieved that anybody would help an illiterate like me that I gladly accepted, not realizing that he was climbing into the kimono with me. Apparently he had to conceal himself and the train wreck of a charade involving my empress-ness had to continue. He poked his head out of the kimono, proceeded to read the speech, which wasn't very interesting as it turned out, and then I woke up.

Whew. Perhaps the lesson is that I should be studying more Chinese over the summer? I'm sorry Ma Laoshi that I couldn't uphold the honor of Oberlin's Chinese department at the royal ceremony!

Downtime and Poll Rollin'

Just to let everyone know, tonight at 7:00 EST the site will go down for 30 minutes due to scheduled Google App Engine maintenance. It should come back up again at 7:30PM. We hope it won't cramp anyone's Chinese practicing style.

Another cool thing that happened today: Nick built a neato little poll widget viewable on your personal homepage so you can now tell us what you think of the site, new features, and occasionally answer random trivia (we promise there won't be many of those). The first poll is about what input device you use. I voted for the mouse, because that's how I roll. However, Nick is a Wacom dude so we're already getting a nice distribution of data points! So if you like answering questions, head to your homepage and check it out.

Scratchpad

I've just uploaded a new practice mode I've been working on for a while: the scratchpad. It's a way to call up some words you want to check out or practice or demonstrate, without saving any practice history. You can choose what words to load by typing or pasting them in the "Add Word" box, or putting them in the URL*, separated by underscores.

So if you're a teacher, you could use this to do in-class demonstrations.

Or if you've got a quiz, you could use this as a poor student's cram mode by putting in the characters you're about to study and cycling through them a bunch of times. Things you get right/wrong won't be saved to your history, but they will go to the beginning/end of the river of words to study, so you'll have to get everything right once before it starts over.

I don't yet know how you'll want to use the scratchpad, so let me know how it works for you, and what else you'd like to see with it.

Try dragging and dropping the words in the river, too, or clicking on a word to jump to it.

Note that you will have to log in to use the scratchpad.


* Internet Explorer won't accept unescaped characters, it seems, but you can make escaped links to them by copying the URLs out of Firefox (but not Safari or Chrome).

Left Atlanta, Greeted Maksym

I have finally returned from the IALLT conference. All told, the conference was a success. When we first arrived, we were a little concerned that we couldn't recoup our investment because it was such a small gathering. What we didn't count on was the high signal to noise ratio. At the ACTFL, we got a lot of hit and runs, but not at IALLT. There were only a few hundred people in attendance, but we got a lot of genuine interest and we were actually able to have helpful, informative conversations with conference goers rather than quick sales pitches. So thank you IALLT planners and attendees for a good experience in Atlanta Georgia.

The less awesome part of the conference was the transportation. To save money, Nick and I drove, which turned out to be an exhausting, but cost effective choice. Upon leaving, I took the long way home and visited my girlfriend for 2 days in Durham NC and got back yesterday at midnight. And lo and behold, our new intern was in our midst! Hoorah!

Maksym was one of our first and most dedicated users. Back when Skritter was but a smearing of pixels across a crudely formatted page, he sought us out and began deluging us in helpful feedback. After months of this intensive treatment, the comments trailed off, and then there was silence. For a few weeks it was as though we'd lost a good friend. But then, he emailed us and the reason for his silence became known. He had turned to his love of Japanese, and Skritter could no longer help him in his foreign language journey. But he kept emailing us with thoughts and suggestions. Then several months ago he suggested that he come and intern with us for the summer. The rest is of course history. He is the first outlander to join us in our command center, and he brings with him knowledge of Japanese and python. He's currently working to improve the scheduling and later he'll be helping us build the Japanese version of Skritter. So everyone bid a fond welcome to Makysm Taran. We'll be updating the team page shortly with a picture of him so that you can bask in his awesome visage.

Today Scott, Maksym, and I worked on formatting the new custom list builder, and we hope to have it out later this week. It's gonna be great.