Lesson ID Redirect

my script works too : http://goulnik.com/cpod/direct/

Hey! I saw that thing up your sleeve!

One of you is saying ?lesson=

and one of you is saying ?v3id=

and you're both using 0 to make four digits, no that didn't distract the audience from watching your hands.

So who's got the rabbit now, and is that only a silk scarf up your sleeve?

Try:

http://chinesepod.com/lesson-redirect?v3id=0700

-remember to include the first "0" for any lessons under 1000.

Uh, John, if I go to http://chinesepod.com/lesson-redirect-v3?lesson=0441

as you posted in the original post of this thread, it says the page doesn't exist.

How did Chinesepod's pagerank suddenly drop from a 6 to a 1? Just a temporary google glitch?

This method still works great...

For those on a Mac, here is a small, and rather crude, AppleScript one can put into the script menu to jump to lessons in Safari:

-- Script begins here

on cpod(lNo)

return "http://chinesepod.com/lesson-redirect-v3?lesson=" & lNo

end cpod

display dialog "Which lesson:" default answer "0000"

tell application "Safari"

set lNo to text returned of the result

make new document with properties {URL:my cpod(lNo)}

end tell

-- Script ends here

I'm pretty sure we're not blocking it.

I'm not intentionally trying to find lessons from the future, but I tell you it's pretty easy, I'd rather see CPod protect their paying content that anybody can easily work out how to access for free. Protecting access to their main site from a crawler that just want to get lesson dates and tags is kind of narrow-minded methinks, just making it difficult and forcing me to do more manual work, what's the gain?

goulnik,

maybe your crawler found too many lessons from the future...not that it eventually even comes up with those mysterious secret bonus lessons.

;)

gotta check my crawler, but it looks like CPod is now blocking my crawler, I thought sharing was encouraged....

thx. I trigger it manually, but it then crawls lesson details and tags

Really cool script. Do you update it manually when new lessons come out, or does it do that automatically?

actually, I have a more elaborate redirect script where you can enter lesson number or (part of) the lesson title, and specify also dialogue, vocab etc.

John, here's the mysterious script, mobile-friendly too...

leviathan,

The Chinese usually refer to "BitTorrent" as "BT."

Sometimes BT means 变态 in net-speak, though, which might be annoying.

Rich,

The titles in the URL are more human friendly (despite your programmer inclinations), plus they're more SEO friendly. Evidence still points to the URL content making a significant difference.

Is there a word for torrent in Chinese ?

All i can find refers to weather!

要中文Torrent搜索引擎

I forgot the ? in the location url, but now I am just sent to the home page, not the actual lesson.

Still wonder why lessons pages use such a long, human unfriendly URLs (even though they use words, doesn't seem easily memorable or typeable). Especially the advanced lessons, where I get a nice long string of encoded unicode characters at the top of my browser.

Wouldn't it had been easier to just make all the URL be .../learnchinese/A0501/ or .../learnchinese/0501/ ? The page Title already does a good job of telling us what the lesson topic is, and doubt anyone gets it from the URL.

Not asking you to change it (this instant anyway, ha ha), but was there a design reason in there, John? Interested in knowing.

Maybe being a web programmer I find short-n-sweet URLs more useful, and you'll more often than not find me often typing URLs... even for ChinesePod pages... I'm not a Bookmarks/Favorites user.

THANK YOU FOR THIS REDIRECT!!! It was on my wishlist (as you may have figured out)

That is weird. The %s is critical; it's where the lesson ID number (or whatever comes after the space when you type it in the location bar) goes.

I forgot to add %s

and worked without the %s in the sidebar?

Weird huh

http://search.us.reuters.com/rsearch/rcomSearch.do?blob=%s

You shouldn't have to load it in the sidebar. I don't.

Doesn't making the keywords all caps slow you down a little when you use them?

It didn't work at first because i forgot to check

'Load this bookmark in the side bar'

I've hidden my sidebar also!

Added CPID, CPD, TRZ, WPB

Firefox trick will save more time that i can measure

Man2Toe,

Yes, that's correct. Maybe you're using the keyword wrong.

You have to type it into the location bar at the top of your Firefox browser window (where the URL usually goes). Make sure there's no "http://" or whatever in front of it.

Hmm, not working for me.

We are supposed to use this location or not?

Location: http://chinesepod.com/lesson-redirect-v3?lesson=%s

Keyword: cpid

No prob!

Is anyone using the Firefox keyword trick? I use it all the time (with all kinds of keywords), and it saves me a ton of time.

The way I usually use it is actually slightly different. If you use Firefox, you can right-click on the text input field of pretty much any kind of search box and add it as a keyword search that way. I keep all my keyword searches in one bookmark folder.

I use keyword searches for: CPod IDs, dictionary lookups (multiple), thesaurus lookups, torrent searches, website proxies, image search (both Google and Baidu).

YAY thanks John!!!!! am doing a review of the newbie & ele levels via the dg.mp3's.

If you're using iTunes, the track number is also the file number - so for a recent file, "Asking for English Books" is A0601, and in iTunes the track number is also 601. (iTunes doesn't take 4-digit track numbers, so I'm not sure what's going to happen in 13 months...)

That being said: adding the lesson number SOMEWHERE on the lesson page would improve things a lot; I'd also like to see a big spreadsheet style page with all of the lesson names, their levels, and the file number. If the items were linked and the whole list sortable it'd be very sweet indeed, but at least a list would help people a lot. Right now there must be so many lessons going unused because people don't happen to stumble across it in a search, and trawling through the lesson lists, page by page, is too tedious.

Organization tip: in iTunes I rename files and add metadata to help keep them organized. For example, all Newbie files are Disk 1 of 6; all Ellie are 2 of 6; and so on. I also rename the albums: for all the main podcast files, I re-name the album "ChinesePod - Podcast". All the dialogue-only files are "ChinesePod - Dialogue", etc. Between the track number, the disk number, and the album names, it makes keeping track of things a lot easier.

Sort of unrelated but still in the convenience vein: please please please add a link, on each lesson page, to the html file, simplified or traditional. I often want a quick look at the html file, but I have to download the PDF, open the PDF, click on the "text version" link, then add a little "trad" text the url. (Of course, digging through my computer to find the already-downloaded PDF file also works, but takes even longer.) (Is the traditional html feature even advertised anywhere?! I think I only learned about it through a conversation posting somewhere.)

goulniky,

What is your "turn-the-lesson-name-into-a-url php utility"? Link us to it!

Conversation search is a whole different matter altogether and we agree it is necessary.

jazz,

You know the ID from the PDF and from the MP3 and PDF filenames.

We don't have an ID for each level because we don't encourage studying the lessons in order. The lessons were not created to be studied in the chronological order they were published (with only a few exceptions).

If you're just trying to study all the Elementary lessons, then what you need is a system for tracking the lessons you've already studied, right? We already have this in its basic form, but we're working on improving it.

ok, that's a workaround to searching lessons by number (would still make sense). but how to go about searching conversations other than googling?

I'm not even talking about full-text searching within the posts but at least searching the subjects. Lesson conversations are easily found but how about the others?

cool, but as John said it only goes to the main page so that won't make my little turn-the-lesson-name-into-a-url php utility redundant quite yet (also allows search by number :-)

John, this seems like it should be really useful, but how do I know the ID of the lesson I'm looking for, before I get there? I've just been doing an Elementary lesson which I only know was "B0305" because that was on the PDF file name when I opened it. But it would be very handy if I could therefore enter "cpid B0306" to jump to the "next" elementary lesson (I like to go through them sequentially on the IPod or I lose track of the ones I've done). But 0306 isn't in "my" logical sequence - it's an advanced lesson from the same date (couldn't that just be "E0305"? Then "B0306" would be guessable..). What I'm really getting at I suppose, is that I'd like to be able to use this redirect-ability instead of trawling through the Lessons list, but to do so I need to know the ID of the lesson I want, and that's not easy to find (or guess). How about including it in the title of the lesson, so it's visible in the IPod list interface?