Hello everyone,
And welcome back here in your virtual German learning study room, today with an episode of the smash hit series
Site Upgrades
Yeeeay!!
Those of you who hang out here on the regular probably know that I’m doing small changes and improvements all the time, but it’s actually been a while that I have added a proper new feature that is worth little introduction.
Well… the wait that no one waited is over :).
I have not one, but two new features finished and I’m really happy to introduce them to you, so let’s go!
Create Your Bookmarks
Bookmarking articles has been something that some readers have asked for every now and then, to just mark posts for later that you find interesting or want to read again and I tried a couple of ready-made systems behind the scenes, but I wasn’t really feeling them that much. Ugly, clunky, crappy code, inflexible.
So eventually, I decided I’ll just create my own and now it’s done :). At least a foundation of it.
From now on, when you have an active membership, you’ll see a button on each article that will add it to your bookmarks. Right now, it’s a heart, but maybe a different icon is better?
No idea, but yeah, here’s how it looks.
So that’s one half of the system and the other half is of course the place where you can look up your bookmarks.
And that’s going to be here:
Your Bookmark Archive
(https://yourdailygerman.com/my-bookmarks/)
I’ll also add that to the menu, under the members’ section, so don’t worry, you don’t have to write that down :)
So here’s how that looks:
At the moment, it shows just the links and a button to remove an article from the bookmarks, but the great thing about building this custom is that I have ALL the flexibility to expand this.
One option for instance would be to also show the short “in this article”-summaries and the cartoons in the archive, so you have a bit more info as to what the article is about.
And another thing I’m thinking about adding (well, I’ve kind of decided it already but I am procrastinating over the work) is that you can also add an article to your bookmarks when it’s just a link. Like… for example, you’re browsing around in my dictionary and you see an article you find interesting in the “Read more” section and you can just bookmark it there without having to open it.
And I think there are more options for this feature, so if you have any ideas, please let me know in the comments. I’ll also put a form up on the archive so you can share your ideas there directly.
But yeah… that’s the feature for now and I hope you like it and of course that it works. There are probably going to be a few bugs in the beginning, but just let me know and I’ll work them out.
Oh and just a reminder – this feature is for members only, so if you’re not a member, you’re not going to see it.
All right. So that is the big one, but there’s another small upgrade.
Feature Help Icons
My site has a bunch of small little features and gimmicks to make studying here more useful and smooth, but they’re kind of on the down-low, in a sense that they’re easy to miss or it’s not always 100% clear what they do.
So I am going to add subtle little “?” buttons next to a bunch of functions. When you click them, a popup will open that gives you a bit more information about the feature or tool and what you can do with it.
If you know the features already, you can just ignore the icons, but for the new readers, I think this can be a nice help to really benefit from all the little things I have added over the years.
I don’t have a screenshot of that but you’ll see them when you see them :)
So yeah… those were my two upgrades for the week.
There’s another one in the pipeline that has to do with listening comprehension but more on that soon.
Let me know any thoughts and of course bugs in the comments and if you have other feature ideas, I’m always interested in hearing them. I can’t promise I’ll do it, but I definitely do want to make the site more and more useful beyond just the content.
Can’t wait to read your feedback, have a great week and bis nächstes Mal.
Oh… app of the dictionary portion is in the works too, by the way ;).
Audio Speed
Dark Mode
Is there ever going to be the possibility of seeing our full vocab lists? I think we chatted about this before but was wondering if anything could change that couldn’t change then. I can only see as far halfway through “B”
It’s over 12000 entries by now. Why would you want all that on one page?
Oh wait, you mean of the ones that you marked?
yeah, just the ones i’ve marked. I can scroll down to “beliebt” but there is no option to see the rest of the entries i have liked beyond that…
I like my new avatar btw. I liked the old one too though as well. Did you draw them yourself?
Oh no, they’re generated based on email address and username. It’s a really old algorithmic thing. Has been around since 2010 or so.
Thanks for setting up the hearts system: I can see myself using them more as a way to enable a “to be read” system than for favourites (ie, delete entry once read…), but the implementation should work perfectly for that purpose. I must admit to finding it easier to just search via google/etc if I’m looking for a particular article/favourite.
ps Have added and deleted a few hearts as a test and everything worked exactly as advertised.
Hoorah for the bookmarks! My work-around has been to write spurious “Notes” about an article, save the Note, and then under “Members”/”My Notes” I can find articles I want to keep track of. about 20 so far. BUT just now, when I went to one of those articles to bookmark it – there was no heart, even though I was logged in! Do you plan to add the heart to all articles, or only some of them? The ones I looked at were your past tense series: https://yourdailygerman.com/preterit-perfect-german-use/, https://yourdailygerman.com/german-past-tense-2/, https://yourdailygerman.com/german-past-preterite-use/, usw.
Ohhh, nice catch. I only added it to the normal articles and forgot the articles that are part of the grammar section. Should be there now!
Yes! The hearts are there, the articles bookmarked. Thank you!
I did watch the video clip of Bastian Sick doing his stand-up comedy on grammar. Someone would have to a clever dick or know-it-all to make grammar funny. I couldn’t follow him word for word, but phrases and clauses were landing nicely here and there.
I found a nice paragraph that confirms my HRE suspicions:
I looked up ‘ultramontan’ and it means ‘streng päpstlich gesinnt’. My other question relates to a paragraph from the Handelsblatt:
Shouldn’t the ‘muss’ be ‘musste’?
Anyone who can think of the book title “Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod” as Bastian Sick did has my vote as a comic grammarian, or pedantly grammatical comedian.
Hmmm, yeah, it’s a weird jump in tenses there.
I think they could argue it away by saying that the idea, once conceived, is not new anymore, so it HAD to be new at the moment of conception, but the thing HAS to be scalable still.
Or you could say it’s a change of perspective from the “having the idea” moment to the current situation about the business model.
But maybe they just slipped up :). I doubt it was on purpose.
In truth I was comfortable with own take on that one. My previous questions were more real. I was just giving feedback so you know your email was not still in an unread state. When I know the author can be trusted then I relax and open up. I also memorize these things, and one wouldn’t want to commit to memory that which is false.
If what you are procrastinating about is clear from the previous parts of the thought, the most natural way to say it is the simple statement “But I have been procrastinating.”
Typo: I procrastinated *over* the work. It’s an intransitive verb..
For once I disagree with Elsa. After 84 years in England and Canada, “interested in hearing” is fairly uncommon, and I have NEVER heard it in the past or future tense. Maybe it’s from Murka? (Trumpland)
Thanks for the new features!
And I, 73 11/12 years in the US, find “I am/was/would be interested in hearing your ideas” very common. Very interesting regional difference. And yes, Canadian English and US English still differ in more than pronunciation.
Oh wow, so “procrastinate” CAN’T take a direct object?! I’ve used that the wrong way so many times then!
Good to know!
In German, “aufschieben” does take a direct object, that’s what made me do it.
If you look it up you’ll see various references to transitive usage of “procrastinate”, but they all sound really awkward to me, and most seem to be somewhat ancient: certainly awkward and ancient enough that I’d avoid them altogether. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used that way “in the wild”.
Danke! This is a really tempting mistake to make for me, so it’s good to know that it’s really wrong wrong.
Would it be possible to arrange our bookmarks in folders that we make? For example I might use “sounding native”, or “grammar tips”, “quizzes to repeat”.
I LOVE this bookmark idea, as I often want to go back to something and can’t find it. I worry that I’m going to have a long sting to search through to find something.
Nice idea, but that’s a bit of work. I think I’ll make them show up on the archive pages first, or I could sort them by category on the bookmark archive.
Yes, if they were sorted into some sort of category they might be easier to find.
Thank you Emanual. Always interesting here!
Hallo,
Here are a couple of typos:
“At least foundation of it” (At least a foundation of it)
“let me know in the comment” (let me know in the comments)
“Let me know any thought” (Let me know any thoughts)
“I’m always interest to hear them” (I’m always interested in hearing them)
Thanks for these features, as a long-time member I’ll probably find the bookmark feature the most useful, but it’s a really nice idea to add the explanations for new members :)))
Bis bald!
Re: “I was interested in hearing them.”
I had that in my mind actually but thought “Nah, this sounds WAAAY too corporate speak for me. The other one must be possible, too.”
I guess not, but is there a way to phrase this without sounding like ChatGPT is drafting an email?
Or maybe, to a native speaker, it doesn’t sound corporate at all. It might be just my personal association with “looking forward to hearing from you” which I associate with formal letters, that’s causing this.
“I’m always interested in hearing them” sounds fine.
In the context of your writing it would flow fine and doesnt stick out… i get what you mean in that it might hit a corporate-y note of “we looking forward to hearing your feedback! We are always interested in what our employees have to say! (Big fake corporate smile)” but it sounds fine … if someone’s worked in a corporate job all their life they may instinctively make that connection first but it’s really not that bad at all
I had to read “i’m always interested to hear them” 2-3x before realizing why it’s wrong, “i’m always interested in hearing them” IS the (more) accurate version but you could probably get away with the former…”i’m always interest to hear them” (without the -ed at the end of interested ) is definitely wrong though and is a dead giveaway someone’s not a native english speaker
Cool, thanks for clarifying this!
I had to read “i’m always interested to hear them” 2-3x before realizing why it’s wrong. Sorry I really don’t get why ” “i’m always interested to hear them” is wrong. Sounds absolutely fine to me.
As a native speaker, ‘I’m interested to hear your thoughts’ is absolutely something I say – I don’t think that using ‘in hearing’ instead of ‘to hear’ is better!
My original phrase had a typo and I had just “interest” instead of “interested”. I think that’s what half the discussion is about, but I fixed that now.
Do you plan to add the bookmark feature to comments, as sometimes the odd comment here or there is worth referring back to but very hard to find 6 months later! :)
Hm, that’s possible but it’s a lot more work, because the comment system is not custom, so I’d have to change the software and then carry the change whenever it updates, which is a huge pain in the rear.
You could just copy paste the comment into your notes for the article and title it “interesting comment” or something?
Understood. Good idea, I’ll ferment that and give it a try next time.
Thanks.
I bookmarked a handful of articles and it worked just fine. I like that there’s a popup to confirm if you want to delete the bookmark. I could see myself hitting the big red X accidentally.
A short summary of the article could be nice. I’m agnostic about the cartoons. I like them when I read the article, but I don’t use them to help remember what it’s about. (I remember the phrasing, how the words looked on the page, and how the audio sounds.) I could see that might be popular though. Maybe the cartoon could be a thumbnail? Something that doesn’t take up too much space.
If it’s not too much work, it might be nice to have the favorite button in the menu with the comment button. So if you’re partway through the article and realize you want to save it, you don’t have to scroll back up.
Good idea, I just have to find a way to deal with this on mobile, because the space on the bottom is really limited and having it hover above article is kind of annoying, I guess.
How about a heart at the bottom of each article too, next to the ‘done’ and ‘pdf’ buttons?
Argh, true, that would make sense.
I’ll do that soon.