New Home Page
We mentioned recently that SpanishSense had a new Home page, and that we’re tweaking it a bit before launching it for ChinesePod. Well, the time has come, and the new Home page has arrived.
Here’s what ChinesePod Home used to look like:
Here’s what it looks like now:
I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but just to sum up briefly what you get now:
- The lessons you’re working on now on your Home page (bookmark them!)
- All the new lessons you want to see (So you can see every new lesson, or just the ones of the levels you’re interested in)
- Downloads directly from the Home page
- Latest comments on the Home page
- Dictionary look-up from the Home page (more on the dictionary below)
If you were one of the few users using the calendar, your scheduled lessons have been moved to your Home page (they’re bookmarked). You can manage these lessons by clicking on the “Your Archive” tab on the Home page. You can control what new lessons show up on your Home page through the “My Feed” tab.
Right now, even though you can get the Extra content in your feed, it doesn’t display on your Home page. We are working on making that happen.
New Lesson Page
When you go to a ChinesePod lesson page, you used to see this:
Now you see this:
The changes to the Lesson page were more subtle than the changes to the Home page. Basically, the main changes are in re-ordering lesson information on the page in order to make the important things clearer and more accessible. New things you will notice are:
- Lesson ID on the page (which will eventually be added into the search)
- Embeddable Player code (works like YouTube’s)
The Embeddable Player itself has been completely redesigned to be more compact for easy inclusion in blog entries. Here is a sample:
All of these Lesson page changes apply to SpanishSense as well as ChinesePod.
We think these changes will make the Home page way more useful for everyone, but please let us know what you think, and how these changes change the way you use the service. I think that if anything, these changes show that we do listen to our user feedback. Let us know how you feel.
-John
Better Dictionary
You may also notice some changes to our dictionary site. We’ve made these in response to the feedback and suggestions we’ve had over the last two weeks, and while we could go on at length about them, this blog post is starting to implode under its own weight, so let’s keep the rundown short. Here are the major changes:
Interface Revisions:
- shifted to our new ChinesePod labs site
- supports user logins
- real-time AJAX dictionary editing
- more intuitive search
User Requests:
- ADDED: wildcard search (*)
- ADDED: English translations for sample sentences
- ADDED: click-to-add popups for vocab lists
- ADDED: friendly URL structure
The server hosting ChinesePod Labs is based in Asia, so access speeds may be a bit slow from the United States and Europe. We’re working to address this issue. In the meantime, we hope that you continue to find the site useful and usable, and please keep the suggestions coming.
-Dave
中文 Chinese
AuntySue Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Oooh, aaah, lesson IDs, goodie! Order has been restored to the universe for those of us with more numerical brains.
Yeah, the other 99% of the improvements are pretty good too.
yan'ou Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Wheeeeeeeeeeee! You’ve gone from great to even better! Having the various downloads clickable right from the home page will save me lots of time. Thank’ee much.
Rehkcts Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:17 pm
I’m so glad I subscribed to ChinesePod. You guys are so dedicated to making it the best it can be.
matthiask Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:25 pm
hoi
little bug:
on http://chinesepod.com/learnchi.....e/dialogue
the “spread the word”-urls say
/learnspanish/intro-6-i-want-to-buy-this-one
and
both are not valid links.
cheers
matthias
leviathan Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:42 pm
WoW it looks Perfect and very effecient.
Well done and 三q.
Dict requests are slow form uk
Neo Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 3:24 am
All the grammar links are now missing from the lesson pages.
Maurice Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 4:42 am
Help!!! I used my feed to download all the scheduled lessons to my I tunes so i can put them on my I pod. I am studying chinese every day in the car -2 hours drive so that goes very well, only i dont know what goes on in the world anymore;-). But now i seem only to be able to add future lesons to my feed. How can I quickly add lessons to my feed. I am just upgrading from newbie to elementary, after 4 months. I wanna keep up the speed.
Please help me
greetings maurice
Corey Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 5:41 am
For me today, the web site seems pretty broken.
For example, if I am NOT logged and then I try clicking in through one of the RSS entry points, I get a crash notice:
Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘PDOException’ with message ‘SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1064 You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘AND lesson2user.lesson_id = 641 GROUP BY user_id’ at line 1′ in /home/cpod/www.chinesepod.com/lib/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php:117 Stack trace: #0 /home/cpod/www.chinesepod.com/lib/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php(117): PDO->prepare(’SELECT COUNT(DI…’) #1 /home/cpod/www.chinesepod.com/lib/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(151): Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Abstract->prepare(’SELECT COUNT(DI…’) #2 /home/cpod/www.chinesepod.com/lib/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php(151): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->query(’SELECT COUNT(DI…’, Array) #3 /home/cpod/www.chinesepod.com/lib/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(302): Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Abstract->query(’SELECT COUNT(DI…’, Array) #4 /home/cpod/www.chinesepod.com/app/models/lesson.php(394): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->fetchAll(’SELECT COUNT(DI…’) #5 in /home/cpod/www.chinesepod.com/lib/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php on line 117
This happens in both firefox 2.0 and IE6.
Also, after I log in, in the “Your Lessons” tab, I am not seeing any lessons on the left side of the screen. It’s all blank.
Is that what it’s supposed to be like? Am I supposed to set something up first?
John B Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 6:22 am
Maurice,
One of the improvements in this new version is that as soon as you bookmark a lesson it appears on your feed, so you don’t need to do any tricks with scheduling things in the past like you did before. Just click the bookmark button on any page or in the lesson listing and it will appear on your “Your Lessons” and then, as soon as you refresh your feed, it should appear there as well.
This is a major improvement in the new interface, and something that I think people are going to really enjoy.
Rich Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 7:49 am
I logged in, and right away said, “Uh, something’s different here.” Very nice.
trevelyan Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
@leviathan - we’ve been trying different combinations of indexing and search methods to try and speed things up. You may get better performance now.
Bazza 白锐 Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Wildcard search works well, any chance you can add single character wildcards as well? ie. ??人 which would just return only three character words.
Auntie Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Yay! The basic architecture of the ChinesePod homepage has gone back to the V2 logic/flow. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. Thankyouthankyouthankyou!
Auntie
Henning Says:
August 24th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
The download-icons are a real time-saver.
Punter888 Says:
August 25th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Sorry guys, I much preferred the old home page. Having a teaser doesn’t really add any benefit. It just refreshes the look and feel. But we lose the functionality of the calendar and now there is no tool for organizing/segregating lessons that I’m interested in studying, lessons that I am scheduled to study, and lessons that have been studies. Why remove a tool that 20% of your users say they valued, and but yet which didn’t pose an inconvenience to the 80% that don’t use?
Otherwise, thanks for the dictionary!
Alex YZ Ye Says:
August 25th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Thank you ChinesePod for listening to and implementing user feedback (mine included). I love the new Web site.
Anne Says:
August 25th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Hey,
I just got back from a long holiday and - hoppla - a lot has happened here! I think exploring it all will be much easier with the new homepage. Thanks for the good work!
Anne
Mike in Singapore Says:
August 25th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
I am a dummy when it comes to computer stuff. It was so nice to have Eileen explain to me how to use the good bits of the new interface.
So for at least one of the dummies out here It is really nice. So Frank we won’t need a book to figure out Chinese Pod for Dummies works. Sorry.
btw: Can anyone suggest how you say “Dummy” in Chinese ?
Mike
Maurice Says:
August 25th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
thanks for the reply John, I have seen now that the lessons are on my ipod without having them scheduled first. and yes this is very convenient. I am really happy with the new site. I already was ery impressed by the old one. I think its a fabulous way of learning. One more question- Any chance there will come a french version of this online language programm? I was asked by my mum fot this
anyway keep up the good work!!
greetz Maurice
Connie Knapp Says:
August 25th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
I really like ChinesePod, and for the most part I like the new changes. I’ve been studying for a little over a year, and I guess must be among the “few users” who found the calendar very useful (like Punter888)-are you planning anything for those of us who really like studying things in some kind of order? Is there a way to keep track of the lessons we’ve studied?
I need the discipline of a schedule, so I really miss the ability to “assign” myself a particular lesson on a particular day, in a particular order.
Thanks!
Mandafars Says:
August 26th, 2007 at 1:48 am
I’m so happy with the changes, that I have upgraded my standard subscription to the premium level.
Paul Says:
August 26th, 2007 at 6:52 am
It just keeps getting better…thanks !
I can’t seem to get to the Listening Test. Has this been discontinued ?
Lantian Says:
August 26th, 2007 at 8:29 am
BETTER SERVICE/SERVER - Dave called it an “issue.” “The server hosting ChinesePod Labs is based in Asia, so access speeds may be a bit slow from the United States and Europe. We’re working to address this issue.”
I say it’s a benefit!!!!!!! (for me anyway who is in China).
Hi Mike,
傻
真傻
傻瓜
Hi Auntie,
V2…nah closer back to V1. Listing all the podcasts, having the comments up front, heh.
Hi Cpod tech,
Do you all actually test against BOTH Internet Explorer and Firefox? And Safari?? I really don’t think you do, only way to prove it to me is to post a snapshot of all the browsers up on three screens in your ‘test lab’. ;p
TITLES - On my little Nano, the old podcast titles with the name front and center makes it easier to scroll and find old podcasts. I am highly deterred these days in my review, simply because I scroll thru this: Intermediate…, Intermediate…， Advanced…， Newbie…, Newbie…, Elementary…, Upper-Intermediate… I realize the easiest fix is for Cpod to comp me an iPod with a larger screen.
PHOTOS - They’ve been really pretty darn good and interesting lately!
Cheers Cpod crew, luv the perpetual change, creative distruction keeps the garden green.
Lantian Says:
August 26th, 2007 at 8:42 am
DICTIONARY -
1) I thought the old font and graphic was more eloquent. This version is boring, feels old, and umm…almost Chinese popup banner, crash no design web design like. (I’m hoping this latest insult prods SOMEbody.)
2) Love the RANDOM function, can it be specified to random WITHIN Cpod vocabulary. I’d luv to use it as a daily/often review of Cpod stuff I’ve already encountered, rather than the whole darn entire Chinese lexicon which I will never ever ever be able to learn yikes help how is it I know some many nonsensical useless and archaic English words??
3) What’s will the ugly little black and white ‘abc’ tab mini-icon. Ain’t it 啊，吡，嘻?
4) Wow, the return of sample sentences like ROCKS MY 世界！
5) Create an on-the-fly mp3 file that has compiled all the returned sentences. Then spinoff a Cpod-Xtreme site, IPO and relax in the Bahamas.
Lantian Says:
August 26th, 2007 at 8:56 am
WIZ - How about making the dictionary into a “Word Interaction Zenter” (trademark Lantian all rights reserved 2007).
1) If you added a comments function after the list of returned example sentences, readers could post their own example sentences, encounters with the word, etc.!
2) If you had a Most Recent Word lookups, Most Looked Up Words, Most Random Useless Word,（aka Most Recent Comments), it sure would be fun. FUN I tell ya.
3) If the WIZ actually had an ability to pull from MY OWN wordlist each day or other scheduled timeframe, or from a particular Cpod level, that would be helpful.
4) If the WIZ also had NCIKU hanzi writing function and I could have it on my Palm, well then the world changes.
5) WIC was also an initial acronym, but in the end WIZ won out…
John Says:
August 27th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Punter888,
With the new Home page, you do have a tool for organizing the lessons you want to study. You need to bookmark some lessons first, then click on the “Your Archive” tab on the Home page. From there, you can mark lessons as “Studied” (which removes them from your Home page, but keeps a list of them there), or you can add tags and tag lessons however you want.
As for the calendar, we’re sorry that you miss it, but we did pretty extensive research before deciding to remove it, and I can assure you that nowhere near 20% of our users used it. Rather than keep two systems, which adds complexity and increases the likelihood of bugs, we decided it would be best to get back to the basics and build on that in future releases.
John Says:
August 27th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Connie Knapp,
To organize lessons, you need to bookmark some lessons first, then click on the “Your Archive” tab on the Home page. From there, you can mark lessons as “Studied” (which removes them from your Home page, but keeps a list of them there), or you can add tags and tag lessons however you want.
John Says:
August 27th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Paul,
Sorry, the Listening Test somehow got left out. We are adding it back to the Home page now (look for it in the menu box at the top right).
Michel - Amsterdam Says:
August 27th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Wow, it looks sharp! As indicated earlier, I liked the study schedule and miss it, but I guess enough has been said about this…
One thing though, on my homepage (just after I log in) I have both my bookmarked and studied lessons. Is it possible to display only the bookmarked lessons, and sort them in a certain order? This way I can replicate the scheduling feature. Plus it is a satisfying feeling to have an empty homepage
Thanks,
Michel
Jingawee Says:
August 27th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
CPod always in the front. No time for sleep.
Just discovered new functionality concerning Vocab: Creates automatically new tagged vocablist for each lesson. Very handy for me. Better looks new homepage. ‘Your Archive’ is so usefull. Great, those improvements.
Richard Mahn Says:
August 28th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I like how the Homepage again has some of the recent posts, that’s nice back from V2… just wish it had some more then just that, as well as top conversations again. Even so, I still prefer my Google Reader to first quickly scan new conversation and see John/Amber answers… with that you don’t have to load an web pages, Google does it quickly like it does its mail.
Eileen Says:
August 28th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Hi Michel,
A mash-up between the old schedule page and the current Home page, interesting idea. Currently, there is no way to only display bookmarked lessons only (or sort them) but I’ll pass that idea along to the team.
Daniel Says:
August 29th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Just a quick question.
Does every lesson have a fix? I’ve tried clicking the fix download button on the main page for a few lessons (35,36, and 38) and it just redirects me back to the main page.
I do like the new look though.
John Says:
August 29th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Michel - Amsterdam,
The Home page will soon be modified so that only “Bookmarked” (but not “Studied”) lessons show. The “Studied” lessons will still be accessible through the “Your Archive” page.
John Says:
August 29th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Daniel,
We are going back and adding the Fix to old lessons as our schedule permits. We have already done the Intro Lessons 1-6, and a smattering of others. In the next few months, the Fix will be added to all the old lessons.
Exciting!
Michel - Amsterdam Says:
August 29th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
John, Eileen,
Thanks for the reply, great to be listened to!
One other thought that came to mind: would it be possible to allow users to add their own private tags to each conversation? This way they can add reminders of each lessons’ challenging items, the date they studied it, or other things that make the lesson special for them.
Thanks again!
Michel
Eileen Says:
August 30th, 2007 at 9:39 am
With the new Home page, you can actually tag lessons now on the “Your archive” page(much like how you tag vocab in the vocab section).
Nikola Says:
August 31st, 2007 at 8:41 pm
@ Eileen
I can’t figure out how I should be able to tag lessons on the archive page. I can only choose between “studied”, “bookmarked” or “remove” - no other option for tags. How can I do that?
Eileen Says:
September 1st, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Hi Nikola,
If you press the “Your archive” tab on the Home page. You will be presented with a list of your bookmarked and studied lessons. On top of the tab page, there is a button that says ” Add”. On the box beside it, type in whatever tag you like such as “problem lessons” and then click on add.
Once you’ve clicked on Add, this new tag should now be included in your choices along with bookmarked, studies or remove.
hisham Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 2:45 am
sorry it’s too long acknowlde,i need to go on learnig chinese by english please help
Eileen Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Hi Hisham,
If you go to http://chinesepod.com, you can pick out the lessons you want to study by searching through our lesson archive or entering a keyword on our universal search box found on the upper right hand side.