A New Feature and Updates

Hello everyone,

so I am actually taking a few days of for a small Urlaub (vacation), so there’s no new article this week (I’ll still answer your comments and emails, though, so fire away).

But I still do have something new for you today, because as you might have noticed, I am always working on the site – adding new features, changing designs, changing designs back and so on. I know that might be distracting sometimes, but I strive to make the site more user friendly and intuitive over time :).
Lots to do still, but  in recent weeks I have finished a few things that have been on my list for a while. So today, I’ll give you a few

Site Updates

You might have seen some of the design changes already but there’s one feature that’s gets its world premier here, so to speak.
So I want to walk you through the new things today and also do a few poll questions to get a better idea how you use my site and what you’d like to see.

Let’s start with the smaller things.

My Link Page

My link page was a dumpster fire for years, not only visually but also functionally because a bunch of links were actually broken.
But I finally kicked in the butt and seriously started giving it an do-over (you can always find it in the menu, but I’ll also put a link below if you want to check it out later).
It’s not finished yet, specifically, I want to add a few of the resources that I have reviewed over the years like Ouino, Seedlang or the Ashkalon series (which is currently burried in the Advent calendar).

And that also brings me to my first question:

So far, I have only reviewed and linked tools and products that I actually really like.
My question is if you would like me to include more resources like Chatterbug or Duolingo, with a little commentary of what I think about them, or if I should stick with a rather “strict” selection policy.

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And my second, related question is if you’d be interested in me writing actual reviews for things like Duolingo and so on… like… real reviews, not just sponsored ad pieces –  with all the good, the bad and the ugly. The benefit of this would be that you all can share your experiences in the comments and other people get a better impression of the product, but I don’t want to do this if the majority of you isn’t interested :)

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Cool. Moving on.

Archive By Date – Redesign

Another “issue” with the site are the archives and the archive that displayed all articles in chronological order looked like it was straight from the 90s.
I have reworked that a bit now. It looks a bit prettier and also, the titles it displays are not the long “Word of the day – xyz” anymore but the actual topic. And that includes many of the Advent calendar posts. So you can now see better, what to expect behind the link :). Again, I’ll add a link below this article if you want to check how it looks now.
I’ll also tweak the other archive types (by wordtype and by category) and I am playing around with a system that might allow to do all on one page… so you can filter by date, category and search term.
And that kind of brings me to the questions I have about the archives… because I have no clue which one you all are using the most and if you’re even using the date archive at all.

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Cool!
And now it is time for the big reveal :)
The world premier of a feature that many of you have been waiting for… at least those who take notes while reading the article, because I now have…

Your Note Archive

If you’re confused… those of you who are members have the option to take their own notes while reading the articles and download them or print them. Or just save them and review them quickly at any time.
Until now, you could only access them from the articles they were taken for but from now on, you can find ALL your notes in the note archive :).
Here’s a screenshot of the core:

From here, you can print, download and delete the notes. By clicking on the big title you’ll get to the note and can edit it. By clicking on the small title underneath you’ll get to the article that the note is for.
I think it’s pretty intuitive, but if you have questions navigating then just leave me a comment here (comments on the note page are not possible).
So yeah… that’s the new archive and for those of you who do take notes, it’s a pretty useful addition, I think :).

Which brings me to the last little question – how many of you actually take notes.

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I’ll add the link to the note archive to the profile page soon and maybe even to the general menu, but for now, you can find it here:

Your Note Archive

And that’s it for today.
Let me know in the comments if you have feedback or suggestions about any of this or anything else on the site for that matter.
I really hope you like them, have a great wee… oh… oh my Gaaaaaawd… what is that… is that… is that… yeah… that’s a

BONUS ROUND

I’m not sure if this is all that interesting for many of you but I recently discovered that my newsletter system has this option, so I have thought I might as well use it… a newsletter archive :).
I have switched systems once, so this archive only goes back a couple of years, but if you’re interested in checking out old newsletters, then you might find this interesting.

Newsletter Archive

I’d love to filter out the ones for the Advent Calendars because there isn’t really anything in them, but for now, you can just ignore those.
So yeah… feel free to completely ignore this archive :).
But if you want some easy informal reading with English translations, that might be helpful.

Cool.
That’s it for today.
Let me know all your thoughts in the comments, have a great week and see you next time.

EDIT 1:

Since quite a few of you seem to be using the category archive, I gave that a much  needed do over. It’s looking a little better now and you can see the cartoons by just hovering over a word. Clicking will get you to the article directly (while before it just loaded the cartoon).

EDIT 2:

Since someone broad it up in the comments… there actually is a way now where you can see ALL your comments. You can’t see if you got a reply (working on that) but you can navigate to the article and check quickly.
You can only see that if you’re logged in.
Here’s where to find it:

I’ll open as an overlay. To close it, just click anywhere outside the box and it’ll go away :).
Hope you find that helpful!

The links:

• My Link Page
• Archive By Date

** Ps: My dictionary is at 8.000 entries by now *mind-blow emoji…. I’m really happy with my progress there.