Here are Skritter HQ things have been particularly busy the last week or so, and we come to you bearing the fruits of our labors! We now have a Chinese mirror for those of you located behind the Great Firewall (www.skritter.cn), our promotion with MDBG has been announced, our February newsletter went out, and we’ve made a number of tweaks around the site.
Many of you have been having trouble with blocked content, general slowness, and 500 server errors from China. We’ve been trying to tweak things for a long time, but a few weeks ago we gave up and decided to just start a mirror of the site to speed up performance and eliminate access problems for those of you access Skritter from 中国. Our preliminary tests seem to indicate that it’s a big improvement, but you be the judge, check out Skritter at www.skritter.cn and let us know how that works!
As some of you may have heard, we have been working with the Chinese dictionary MDBG for a little while testing some cross-functionality. On Sunday, we officially announced the launch (you can read the MDBG press release here). The promotion lets anyone add vocabulary from MDBG to their Skritter Queue directly without any copying and pasting. So, the next time you’re browsing MDBG and find a character you’d like to learn, just click on the little “S” icon and you can get your Skritter learn on when it’s convenient. We’d like to thank MDBG for being willing to make this happen. We’ve been fans of the dictionary for a long time (I’ve used it extensively for my Chinese homework) and we’re happy to be working together.
Our February newsletter went out a little late in the early morning (EST) of February 16th. For those of you who didn’t get it, you can check it out online here. It includes an interview with a new Skritterer, site updates, coming features, and the site stats from the last month. The January contest is going to be concluding shortly, and we’ll be including news of the winners in next month’s newsletter as well as a new feature: a pro tour of some of Skritter’s less well understood features.
If you were effected, the list creation debacle has ended, and editing is now back to normal. We lost several of our own lists in the bug, and we appreciate how understanding everyone has been. Everything is back to normal and will remain thus.
Nick has created a bookmark that enables you to add words on any page to your Skritter Queue. The “Bookmarklet” as Nick christened it, can be accessed from the the bottom of the vocabulary page. It currently doesn’t have an icon (okay, that’s my bad), but it seems to be working well. Let us know what you think of that.
We posted on the forum a little while ago looking for some linguistic help, and we are going to be posting our hiring decision shortly. There are other big changes that need announcing soon, but that’s for another blog post.