New Home Page on ChinesePod!

John
August 23, 2007, 11:15 AM posted in General Discussion

You've probably noticed already. Let us know what you think, or if you find any bugs.

Details on the blog.

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lunetta
August 23, 2007, 11:31 AM

You can't launch the new home page just like that. I'm supposed to be studying, not checking out the new site! :-)

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John
August 24, 2007, 05:55 AM

Bazza, Hmmm... I will have to look into that for you. I'm no Flash guru.

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lunetta
August 23, 2007, 11:37 AM

Naah, I guess not... :-) I don't know if this is a bug or not but the main page doesn't show up properly in my browser (mozilla firefox). The comments are not on the righthand side as they are supposed to.

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trevelyan
August 23, 2007, 11:57 AM

I had the same problem. Try holding down shift and refreshing the page -- that will make sure you aren't using a cached copy of the CSS file.

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chrka
August 23, 2007, 12:41 PM

I am not really sure I entirely "get" the new homepage. This is probably just me being stupid, but anyhow: Under the "Your Lessons" tab, I see my lessons and they all have a little pop-up menu. Some lessons are marked "Bookmarked", which I understand fine, and some are marked "Studied", which is also fine, altough I think that I would prefer not to seem them when I am looking at "Your Lessons" (shouldn't they be under "Your Archive" only, or have I misunderstood the organisation completely?). Now, the thing I don't really get is why some lessons are marked as "Remove"? (That is an action, right?) Oh, and at least for me, using the site when I'm not logged in doesn't wor. I get error messages when I try to look at individual lessons. (Mac OS X 10.4.10, Safari 2)

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lunetta
August 23, 2007, 12:56 PM

The shift thing didn't work :-( Two other things: Why does the comment list only show recent lesson comments and no comments to user conversations? And why does all of my bookmarked lessons show, I thought all the studied ones were supposed to go away from the main page?

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mahouer
August 23, 2007, 12:58 PM

It's the same for me. Can somebody please explain this "remove" thing in the drop down list, and also why some lessons are marked as "removed" by default? And yes, why is the home page a mixture of bookmarked and studied lessons put together? So I understand correctly that the study schedule has disappeared? That's not an entirely bad thing if it's replaced by something better (my opinion) but I haven't been around for a while so I'm just trying to catch up with the changes here. Thanks

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henning
August 23, 2007, 12:59 PM

Much better. Suggestions in case you get bored: :) - Include comments in User Conversations also. - Make clear how lessons get onto the new Home page (for the first time ever I activated that "Feed" and now hope that the effect will be that new lessons will automatically be "bookmarked" and thereby appear on the Home page - am I correct?) - Show Dictionary-Content in an area on the same page instead in a new window.

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bazza
August 23, 2007, 01:02 PM

I was going to say I'm not too keen on it, but after a proper refresh it looks great. :)

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chrka
August 23, 2007, 01:16 PM

The urls for "Spread the word" in the lessons pages seem to be wrong. For example, the url for the tai ji quan lesson is given as "http://chinesepod.com/learnspanish/tai-chi"...

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John
August 23, 2007, 11:33 AM

You can't say we didn't warn you! :)

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test1
August 23, 2007, 03:01 PM

Don't like it at first glance.Things were clearer before.

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bazza
August 23, 2007, 03:30 PM

Yeah the lessons urls are definitely wrong.

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lunetta
August 23, 2007, 03:49 PM

Finally figured out how to refresh it properly... Now it looks okay. Me and computers ;-) I tried removing one of the lessons and bookmark it again but now it doesn't show up again neither on the main page neither in the personal archieve... Hmmm...

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man2toe
August 23, 2007, 03:55 PM

新的主頁是非常有用的. 比舊主頁有用多了. 中文播客,你們勤勞的工作天天會給我幫助.多謝!

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lunetta
August 23, 2007, 04:11 PM

Can you tell I'm procrastinating? :-) I found the lesson again, not on the top where I would expect the most recently bookmarked lesson to go but 5 or 6 lessons down on the second page of lessons. This kind of inconsistency happens when adding words to the vocabulary as well, or at least it seems so to me, and it drives me crazy. I like my bookmarked things to be neatly in order with the oldest last...

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tato78
August 23, 2007, 05:32 PM

Grammar links on each lesson have disappeared. Please bring them back. They are very useful and save plenty of time otherwise wasted in browsing for the right grammar point. Thank you.

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John
August 24, 2007, 01:35 AM

@tato78: Don't worry, we're not eliminating the Grammar links. They will be back shortly. @chrka: The "Studied" lessons are not supposed to display on the Home page. That will be fixed very soon. (You can access your "Studied" lessons by going into "Your Archive" on the Home page.) The "Remove" thing was a bug that we fixed immediately after launch. If any lesson shows "Remove" as its state, then you can change it (and change it back if necessary) and it should work fine. Lesson URLs are getting fixed. Player problems appear to be Firefox only, but we're fixing them now. We were here late last night trying to get everything perfect, but in such a complex system, perfect is a tall order. Anyway, everything should be fixed soon.

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bazza
August 24, 2007, 05:48 AM

Is the object classid in the lesson embed code the same for all lessons? I might attempt to make a new tag for the forum to embed lessons into posts.

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foleadu
August 23, 2007, 01:33 PM

New home page looks great! On the lesson pages, it has become more difficult to use the built-in player. When I move my mouse over it, I don't get the 'little hand' as before; it remains an arrow. It seems like this happened with the new changes. Does anyone else have this problem?