Another week, another update! For a while now I’ve been making major changes to the vocabulary list backend. The first half of those changes allowed me to make the custom list system, and the result of the second half completed today is the complete reorganization of the way ChinesePod lists work. Improvements include:
- Calling ChinesePod’s servers less frequently by caching data on our servers, making both browsing and adding from their lists just about as fast as native Skritter lists.
- More stability.
- A new ChinesePod list page for signing in and finding the lesson or label you want to use.
- ChinesePod lessons are split into two sections: Key Vocabulary and Supplementary, instead of lumped into one.
- Words you add from ChinesePod lists will have the specific list and section names shown when you practice, as opposed to before when it just said ‘ChinesePod’. I’m afraid words that have already been added from ChinesePod lists will continue to say ‘ChinesePod’, but if you add from those lists again the items should get the more specific list data.
A few other changes have been made to the site: I decided to take the inner tab system that was used in places like the pricing and list pages and am using it now on the preferences and vocabulary options pages, sorting them a bit more nicely. Made some changes to the main vocabulary page too.
And now, I’ve got a handful of relatively small things to do, bug fixes and smaller feature requests. And then after those are done I’ll revamp the progress tracking system to both improve it on the backend and allow for rankings so you can see where you stack up among the other Skritter users. The new progress tracking system also just so happens to be a prerequisite for Japanese…
Onward!