YDG News – Site Upgrade and a Question

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Hello everyone,

I hope you’re doing great and have a minute for a quick episode of

Site News

Because I’ve been quite busy working on the site behind the scenes last week and I want to fill you in on some improvements and I also a questions /offer.

But let’s start with the changes and upgrades.

New Settings Menu

For a long time, the night mode button in the lower left corner of the site.
That changes now. From now on, you will find a settings button there.

Here’s how it looks:

Clicking this will open the settings menu and in the settings menu, which looks like this:

(You can close it by the x button or just by clicking anywhere outside.)
As you can see, you can do three things there for now, to make the site more useful and usable for you.

1) set playback speed

You can adjust the playback speed for the audio examples (including your own recordings). It’s done in the browser so it’s not the best quality but 70% speed is still fairly good and it can help if the examples are too fast for you.

2) Activate and Deactivate Night mode

No explanation needed. This is the same button as before, but I figured that most of you don’t constantly switch between night and dark mode, so the button doesn’t really need to be always visible.

3) Set Example Blur

And I actually have a really useful upgrade for this feature, so let’s talk about that next.

Example Blur 2.0 (It remembers)

Example blur is one of the most useful features in my opinion. In every article and also the dictionary portion of YourDailyGerman, there are plenty of examples in German with an English translation along AND audio.

Example blur let’s you blur German, English or both as a default, so you can’t read them. So you could just show German and try to figure out what it means, or you could show just English and try to figure out how the German version would be.

Or you could hide both, and just try to see if you can understand from the audio alone.

To un-blur an example, all you have to do is click anywhere on the blur, so it’s really quick and easy.

Here’s a screenshot of how it looks with German blurred:

By default, both languages are visible, but if you want to blur one or both of them, you can do that in the settings menu I just showed you.

And now comes the new, especially for those of you who are using example blur:

The site now remembers your settings.

Until now, you had the set up the blur anew with every new article or dictionary entry.

No more! The site now remembers your settings so you can set English examples to blurred in the settings and then they’ll be blurred in every lesson and dictionary entry by default.

If you were using example blur, this should be a BIG upgrade.

Now, this whole thing is saved in the browser, not your member profile. So it is saved for a device, not for the user. But still, I think that’s pretty useful.
I’ll also save the audio speed setting like that soon but I don’t know how many of you are even using it.

Cool.

So those were the big design changes and upgrades.

I’ve also moved around a few smaller things and I am cleaning up night-mode right now, to make it actually pleasent to look at.
So if you have any glitches there, please let me know (I’m aware it’s glitching hard on the dictionary at the moment. I’ll fix that next).
Oh and just a heads-up… the example blur will glitch up here and there too. The reason is that my site has grown and evolved over more than a decade already and this function is still fairly new and I had to hack it into all the older content via some very risky regular expression magic. But there are edge cases, so yeah… bug reports always welcome.

Anyway, on to the question/offer.

Correcting your Writing – New(ish) Series

A year or more ago, I tried out a new type of article where I basically take a text from one of you and we read it together and I correct all the mistakes and also comment why something is wrong or should be said differently.
We’d go through the text sentence by sentence and you could try to find the mistakes first before looking at my solutions.

I actually thought this was a really useful series and I also think you enjoyed it, but for some reason I forgot about it.

Anyway, I’d like to try this again!

So if YOU want to be part of this series AND please send me a text to info@german-is-easy.com.
The level doesn’t really matter, it’ll be interesting either way for most people. Just please not longer than 600 words and if you share personal anecdotes, please change names. It’ll be online here for the whole world to see. The world won’t care, but yeah… I feel like it’s just a question of respect to not use names of people online without their consent.

Anyway, the stories we had when we did the series were really great and I do think it’s an amazing learning tool, so I hope you’re up for it and I very much look forward to your submissions.

Cool.

So that’s pretty much it for today.
Well, except one more thing:

Since several people have asked for a way to contribute to the project and the scholarship pot independently of a membership, I have set up a way to do that.
I’ll add it to the membership page soon, but for now, I’ll just put the link here.
What it’ll do is it’ll take you to the payment processor Stripe and there you can pick whatever amount you want. It does not affect your membership here and you don’t have to set up an account here if you don’t want to (some people mentioned that).

Support YourDailyGerman and the Scholarship pot

Thanks a lot for the support!

And that’s pretty much it for today.

Let me know if you have any questions or if any of the new features are not working.
I think I actually fixed these annoying lags with the layout changes, so now, whenever I change something, it should work fine without you having to clear your cache But yeah… glitches gonna glitch.

So let me know if something looks weird.

Anyway, I hope you like these news have a great week and I’ll see you very soon with a new lesson. And don’t forget to send me your writing if you want to be part of the series.

Have a great weekend and see you next time.

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Oh, if you want to check out the older episodes in this series, you can find them here in the super top secret weird looking archive you cannot find on your own :)

Reading your Stories – Writing and Listening Practice – Archive