Happy New Year everybody!

I'd like to thank everyone who has supported this little website last year - whether it is through donations or sending me your feedback! I'm super grateful for each and every donation - and I apologize if I haven't replied to all of them.

Kanji Koohii is 17 years old !

Just for fun here is a throwback screenshot from August 2007. It's sadly one of only two oldest screenshots I have of the actual running site - complete with the Firefox chrome!

This screenshot above is from Aug 2007, and we can compare it to an earlier one from Dec 2006 which I shared previously in Blast from the Past - December 2006 !.

There are a few noticeable changes:

• well obviously we have ~200 members reviewing, instead of ~100 ... "wow!" Haha, I think I took those screenshots as they were actually milestones. We have a list of people reviewing, and how many flashcards they reviewed that day. Interestingly this feature is no longer here on the members page we have the total amount of flashcards shown but not how many cards people reviewed that day.

• then we have a small JapanesePod101 ad on the sidebar. Holy cow... JapanesePod101 is an amazing sponsor for this site and has been with us since 2007! I can't thank them enough!

• moving on the main content, we have a finely crafted /facepalm dashboard consisting of three large buttons "Progress Chart" "Review" and "Study". Gotta love that web2.0 background gradient and the big glossy buttons (or, more likely, I have no idea what I was doing ;-) ). Pretty much the same format we've had until the complete redesign of the dashboard last winter - with moderate tweaks to the colours and layout over time

• notice there is a "reading" tab. I really need to catch up on this but I am happy to say the "sight reading" section of the site is still here - as I have been asked about it a few times. I did redesign this functionality as it was rendered obsolete with all the Javascript refactoring I had to do throughout 2021. So the feature IS still here, just that I wanted to do some further optimizations... but what the heck, it's only available to members anyway so if you read thus far you can find the Kanji Recognition page here at /kanjirec. It's completely usable as it is. Please know the URL might change but you'll know as I'll eventually add it back to the main navigation.

I 'member!

I also have a screenshot from a review on JapanTimes.co.jp dated October 2007!

While the article is still online (albeit it was cut short for some reason), I thought I'd post the screenshot I have from 2007 as it can be fun to compare with their live site.

Bless Mary Sisk Noguchi as she is no longer with us. Mary gracefully invited me and we had a lunch together while I visited Japan in April 2007. I remember she showed me her copy of the RTK book which was signed by Dr James Heisig.

So ... that's enough nostalgia for today!

Plans, plans plans

It's too early to say what I may work on this year, but looking at my notes there's a few things that stand out:

• I did write earlier that I want to add some kind of navigational pane to the Study search box, to make it easier to jump between kanji - so I may still work on that

• the Kanji Recognition page is fully functional so it'd be a shame for it to just linger in a drawer, I need to finetune it and put it back in the main site navigation

• an idea I had recently would be to add a choice of FONT in the User Settings - this require the user to know about the CSS font names - I guess I could have a dropdown with some common options - this would let you enforce sans serif / or serif fonts if you like for all the kanji on the site ... please let me know if you'd like to see me work on this!

• there's a few minor bugs I need to fix, eg. Github issues #265 (a small visual bug), #277 (Review Summary table sorting is buggy)

Here we go

Things are looking brighter for me this year in recent developments - and I hope for you too.

The world is quite a wild place today - from AI & ChatGPT to Twitter shenanigans, to post-pandemic life, to inklings of space brothers aka "UAP"s, to a warming planet... where do we even start?

Again, deeply grateful for your support to this little website over the years! It makes a difference, whether you are a Patron for a month or more, it all adds up.

All the best in your kanji learning journey!