It looks like we have a new mascot at Reviewing the Kanji! The kanji literate rodent is the creation of member paddy71 (aka Paddy Duddy) who got in touch with me about his kanji business idea www.kanjiposter.com :

"I came up with the idea of making a poster with all the kanji I was learning on it so I could stare at it while sitting at the office (I work in the graphic design and print industry). Then I decided to laminate it so I could write on it with a dry erase marker."

I couldn't resist posting paddy's detailed instructions for "How to Use the Kanji Poster" :

I really like the ad and I thought it could be useful to learners out there. I actually looked for one myself when I was studying RtK, but had no luck back then. Here's to kanjiposter's success! It is the year of the mouse (okay, rat) in Japan, after all ;)

I've addressed all but one issue related to the last update.

Out of the issues that were mentioned, the one left to do is to change the links in the "All my stories" list so that they work without Javascript, because it prevents the use of the handy browser shortcuts that let you open a story in a new tab (the shift-click and middle-mouse-button-click shortcuts work in nearly all browsers).

I also removed the "public stories" page, and merged the "Stars" and "Reports" options into the All My Stories list. The first click on those columns sorts in descending order, thus most starred/most reported/latest edited stories come first.

This update introduces a "My Stories" page as well as a "Published Stories" page, and a slightly updated "Failed Kanji" page.

The "My Stories" page simply lists all your stories, public and private. The "Published Stories" page lets you review your publicly shared stories and also see only those that other members voted on.

Both pages have a layout for printing, where all the extras (page header, footer, etc) are removed so you get an output similar to the RtK book. Let me know how it goes and I'll try to finetune it over time, I need to install some kind of fake printer because I don't have one at home and Firefox for example, wouldn't let me see the Print Preview.

The search box is always available and is auto-focused when the page finished loading.

PS: there is a silly bug whereby the pager will not remember the sorting in the stories lists. I need to fix this bad habit of putting updates online just before racing to bed.. this bug will be fixed tomorrow evening if I have time.

I'm working on new pages in the Study area where you can get a list of all your stories. You can see private, or public or all of them together. You can also show only the starred ones, or the reported ones so you will be able to see which ones other members liked, or which ones could use a little editing (those that were reported); as was suggested in the forum.

Incidentally that means you will also be able to print out your stories. Technically I'll try to make a good print "stylesheet", so the html pages will print without the header/footer etc; without the need for fancy Adobe Acrobat documents ;)

Should be up this weekend at the latest.

The review graph should display again properly in IE6 (and IE7 hopefully, though I haven't been able to test).

Sorry for the lack of news, I have been busy this week-end and still more tonight converting all my to-dos to the "Getting Things Done" system.

The past few months I have been excited working on the upcoming Trinity but at the same time there's no denying that I've been slowly coming to a paralysis.

I kept trying to find causes for lack of energy in my sleep habits, food, sport, etc. going round in circles, and it never occurred to me before that I needed to get organized and learn to manage my time better!

One of the last things I tried about a month ago was to convert all my to-dos for the website into a big "mindmap". I thought this would give me a better overview of the progress on the site and the remaining work to get Trinity into a first online version...

BAD IDEA. All it did in retrospect is make me feel even more overwhelmed by the never-ending stream of to do's and potential features. Probably worse is that it was almost unconscious so I had no idea of what was going on.

One key idea in "Getting Things Done" is to define clear "next actions" for every item on the to-do lists. That kept me busy for a good part of the weekend, and I'm still working on it tonight.

Another key concept is to get it all out of your head. I was just sapping my energy by constantly reminding myself of what was NOT done yet.

Anyway, you will probably hear more about this GTD method if it works well for me, hopefully we will see the results...