Search for lessons not bookmarked

baillies

July 20, 2008, 08:38 AM posted in General Discussion

I would really like the ability to filter a channel to see lessons that I have not bookmarked yet, maybe it could be added as an extra column in the my lessons (my archive) section that currently lists bookmarked and studied lessons by channel.

Anyone else interested in this or know how to get this result already?

lostinasia

July 21, 2008, 03:11 PM

baillies, great idea. Your suggestion seems like a good feature for managing lessons, but I don't believe it's readily available.

Short answer for outside ChinesePod, and possibly the best one: just use iTunes playlists for which podcasts you've played, and which ones you haven't. Unfortunately, this doesn't provide links to lessons.

Long answer within ChinesePod: I think I've found a way to do this, although it's MESSY and convoluted. Unfortunately there aren't enough logical operators to work with in the Archive section. The below MAY work.

(Note that I keep all my lessons "Active" - I never indicate any as studied, because that seems to remove them from my archive (?!). To be honest I don't really get the bookmarked/ subscribed/ studied/ assigned thing; it seems to make lessons even harder to find.)

Anyway:

The lessons that you've studied: get them in your archive by bookmarking them. Tag them with a new label - "Studied" seems an obvious one. While you're adding labels, add another to your label set called "Unstudied."
Go to Lessons/ Sets. Find the set that I've added called "Elem" - this is ALL elementary lessons (give or take). Bookmark this set - I think that's a button at the bottom. (I've chosen Elementary because that's what you've indicated as your level.)
If I've got this right, that Elem set is now added to your labels. (I HOPE they've been added to your archive, although I'm not sure if it works that way. If it doesn't, this procedure probably won't work at all, or at least you'll have to spend hours clicking through "Bookmark" on every lesson.)
Now, in your archive, Show "Elem". Some of these should be double-tagged with "Elem" and "Studied". Select ALL of these and tag them "Unstudied."
Now, Show "Studied" - all of which will be triple-tagged "Elem", "Studied", and "Unstudied". There's the option "Remove label..." - so Remove the Label "Unstudied" from this subset.
You should now be able to pull up all the Studied Elementary lessons within your archive, or all the Unstudied ones. In theory...
If you're nuts and a glutton for punishment, repeat this with the other levels that I'll soon add to the lesson sets.
Of course, this will require constant maintenance on your part of what's been studied and what hasn't. Annoying, to say the least.

As I've been trying to figure this out, I've realized the Archive seems awfully buggy - for example, now it's letting me ONLY remove labels, not add new ones, no matter what I select. I hope exiting and re-opening my brower will fix that, but I don't want to lose what I've typed here

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May I point out that all of the above should be totally unnecessary? It should be very easy to see a list of ALL lessons, selected by level, and we can choose whether to toggle different switches like studied or not. The archive is way too messy for easy exploring. Or are we missing something obvous?

Good luck!