Lost perspective of time in CPod World...time-line vanished

You asked: "Ken, John, whoever: was this intentional, to get away from dates to make it seem like one can start anywhere?" Yes. A newer lesson's content is not more or less important than an older lesson's content. Content has to be the focus, not dates. This becomes increasingly important as the archive grows. If you feel lost, it may be because we have not provided enough tools to allow you to arrange and navigate the content. We will do our best to accomplish that. In the meantime, the new calendar is pretty cool. I would think that would appeal to someone who is very time-oriented.

I miss the lesson numbers the most. The PDF files used to have the lessons numbers on the bottom of the page too. This way, those who print off the PDF and file them, could find their desired lesson rather easily-by the lesson number by the title-高級 46 寵物熱 or at the bottom of the page A46_20061212. This system really seemed to make finding lessons on the mp3 and pdf files much easier.

I'm actually still counting and renaming - for my own system of print outs/ computer files/ flash cards, I absolutely require a numbering system. Oh well; ChinesePod may have abandoned this, but I can just keep counting. A suggestion to ChinesePod: a while back you gave us links to spreadsheets with all the lesson names, levels, dates, and lesson # based on your new numbering system. How about making something like that an additional "Lesson Quicklist" page? Ideally make it sortable by date, or level, or lesson #, and try to put as many lessons as possible on one page. That way someone can look for lesson #350 (which doesn't exist, AHEM!, and boy did trying to figure that out mess up my overly-anal accounting brain - but that's Chinese my way...), or look for lessons in March 2006, or all lessons for the past month that they've been on vacation instead of looking from tab to tab in the Explore section. Why this would be helpful: you look through your iTunes and suddenly realize, based on track numbers, that you're missing #499. And unfortunately, that's basically the only way now to realize that you've missed a lesson! Finding out WHAT #499 is, however, can be a major pain. Then you discover that #499 is a Media lesson and well beyond your level anyway. Or: you want to go through the "Early John in Intermediate" lessons because the banter is a good bridge from Upper Intermediate to Advanced. Yes, you can figure this out by searching for "Calligraphy", then find Calligraphy, find out the date, then try to look at all Intermediate lessons and then click on the numbers along the bottom until you find the right date. But a Quick links or whatever page would make it a lot easier. Anyway, that's one suggestion for the interface. Thanks!

Still, I think as much as ChinesePod wants to have each lesson not relying on to knoer lessons, and it should, the fact that we get lessons each day and want to know when that day was, the date is still important. Sure, I could put the lesson on the calendar, but that would be the date I chose, not when it came out, and yes, I admit that I don't use the calendar, cuz I don't see what putting it on there does except shows the icon for the lesson on my home page. Since I listen to the lessons on my Nokia N70 phone, I used to use the lesson dates on knowing which ones I need to catch up on. That has vanished, so not only am I'm not using the calendar, I probably haven't listen to two weeks of lessons. Again, I'm a date freak and am driven by making sure I'm caught up with things that need dating. Not complaining, just trying to figure this out myself. I thank you guys for doing what you can for making lesson ordering and, while you don't want lessons to be dependent, it would help to have some more order of them. 加油！ -R

ditto