The website was updated yesterday with a new feature that should help with navigation through the Study pages.

In its current implementation, the "Last Viewed" widget keeps track of the last ten kanji you have visited in the Study pages. It is shown only on desktop, in the Study page side bar (I have no idea where I would fit it in mobile).

Feedback is welcome in issue #275 on Github - or the contact form.

I have not currently set an expire date, so the last ten visited kanji are kept indefinitely. However please note the state is saved locally in the browser. It is not maintained across devices - and it may be cleared if you manually clear the "local storage" in your browser. Given the functionality I felt it was an acceptable trade-off to simplify the implementation, as well as lighten the load on the server side.

The widget may also provide better context to the kanji pages that feel otherwise relatively disconnected (besides the indexed ordering). So for example when you leave the site and pick up again the next day, you can see which kanji you were working on - or looking up - and remember what you were doing.

I made sure that extended unicode characters work. If you enter eg. #34584, you'll get to the Study page for "spider" (which even has quite a few stories!) - however there is no keyword as it is not included in RTK. There are thousands of kanji and hanzi that are in the database which can be viewed in the Study pages - but are not part of RTK1/3 and hence have no default keyword. Those are what I call "extended frame numbers". Put simply, if the website sees an index value above or equal to 0x3000 (12288), it assumes it is an unicode value instead. This works out well since the RTK indexes are well under that range , while the unicode values for hiragana, katakana and kanji are above.

Soooo long story short, those "extended" (non RTK) kanji will show in the "Last Viewed" widget, with an empty "-" (dash) keyword - unless you customized the keyword in which case it will show!

The idea came about after Shibodd's suggestion #267 "Add a way to jump between kanji".

Next

I will work on Shibodd's suggestion soon. This one should in theory be usable on mobile as well. At least on paper, what I envision is there will be a small button next to the search field, which opens a popup where you can pick from a grid of kanji. This one's utility will be more about jumping between kanji in the same lesson, or lessons before and after - where you can recognize the kanji visually and you won't need to type in a keyword or a frame number.

Since Shibodd's feature #267 is more complex, I will probably post a mockup here to gather some feedback before I start implementing.

Hope you like the change!