The Rememberize Blog

Unfortunately over the last few weeks there have been some serious issues with the Import feature. I am looking into this issue, but at the moment all I can do is apologise for the inconvenience.

Hopefully this doesn’t dampen your rememberizing. Thanks for sticking around.

Rememberize development continues, and I provide a little peek at the new ‘Discovery’ screen. Similar in functionality to what exists now, but with a couple of friendly new pieces of information, and some helpful sorting options.

You can view larger versions here and here.

I won’t talk about my year long absence from development, other than to say I had a year long absence from development. Not intentionally mind you, it just happened. With new found vigour I hope to roll out some new features in the next few months, including a tweak of site design. The colours and simple theme will stay, but you will notice the difference. Though these changes won’t go live for a while yet, I’m going to post some peeks into the progress on the blog.

First things first, the home page. This is where users first greet rememberize (and vice versa), so it’s become a lot simpler, with the main functions more prominently displayed, and the popular tags shown in a little more artistic manner. A subtle usability change will occur too. If you are already logged in (by ticking the ‘remember me’ check box on the login page), going to rememberize.com will take you directly to your set page - if you are a regular user, there isn’t really anything on the welcome page for you.

Want a larger version?

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please leave them.

Cheers!

You weren’t all supposed to get them yet, but while I was uploading a few bug fixes, I also uploaded a small update to the ‘My Sets’ screen. You’ll now have another small box above the Tag Filter box - an Order By box. This will allow you to float to the top of your Set list those sets that require your attention to learn, or that you have been learning most recently. Hopefully those of you with an ever-enlarging set list will find this useful.

The much lauded (at least in my mind) performance upgrades have been slightly marred by a code change that, well, made the ‘learn’ page go pear-shaped for large sets. I’m working on this and will have an update soon.

Thanks for your patience!

The feature rollout that was to occur a few days ago didn’t actually happen. There were some issues with it, so we reverted to the previous Rememberize that you’re all familiar with. With a bit more time on my hands today though, I beat out the problems, and there are some shiny new features you can now enjoy.

Set Reviews
This has been an oft demanded feature. Sure, the Leitner schedule Rememberize employs is great for optimising the learning process. But what if you want to just immerse yourself in a set, relearning the cards continually. Now, that is possible with the new ‘review’ set command. You will be presented with a page very similar to the learn page, but the review acts completely outside of the Rememberize scheduling system.

Card Styling
Very simple card styling is now available using a subset of Textile markup. A handy formatting toolbar makes this simple.

GIANT Set Capabilities
There have been a few recent sets created with quite a large number of cards present (almost 4000 cards in one instance). These gave quite some trouble to some subscribed users who reported that Rememberize was having, well, minor conniptions. Some extensive modifications have been made to the Rememberize architecture to cope with sets of this size.

If you are still having any performance issues with these large sets please let me know.

The Small Things
There have been some other minor tweaks that will hopefully make life more enjoyable. For instance, the search page now gives a card count for each set so that you don’t waste time examining empty sets.

Quite a bit of work has gone in to these enhancements, and they really do make for a better Rememberize. Enjoy!

I’m rolling out a few new features tonight, so things might get a bit iffy for a few hours. Let me know if you are having any problems with the site, and I’ll fill you in on the extent of the new features tomorrow.

Cheers!

It’s often those small things that can be the most vital. Ever since the inception of Rememberize, for example, the small option to choose which side of a card to display while learning has been, at least for me, indispensable. When I wrote a brief spec outlining the requirements of Rememberize v1.0, that was in there. It was, for my use of flashcards, a necessity.

But, it’s often those small things that can be the most vital. You see, the feature was flawed. It didn’t persist – I could say one day that I would like random sides shown, but by the next day, Rememberize would’ve forgotten this desire. This is not good – it annoyed me, and therefore, probably you. And so, I fixed it.

The options drop down in the learning screen now has the ability to save your current settings. So if you like your cards on the metaphysical poets to display a random side, you can tell it to do that permanently, and if you’d like your cards on the top 10 largest deserts to always show the frontside of a card, you can tell it to do that. Permanently.

Above and beyond that, you now also have the ability to choose the font size and type for your sets. This will help when you are learning longer strings of text, and would like it to fit in the card without scrolling. Obviously, this too can be saved to be a permanent change.

I hope you like this change.

PS. I also changed some parts of Rememberize to take advantage of some caching technology. Hopefully this will increase responsiveness, and not produce any weirdness. But should weirdness occur, please report it to me – admin [ at ] rememberize [ dot ] com

A couple of new features have appeared in Rememberize.

CSV Import
For every set you can now choose to import cards from a CSV file instead of inputting them one by one. This should be handy for people who already use a Flashcard program. Just go to the ‘card’ screen for any set you own, and the import option appears on the right of screen.

Discussions
Users can now discuss sets they are learning about. There is an additional link that appears in each set box titled ‘discuss.’ This link will appear in bold type when a new comment has not been read by you.

Ads
Eek! Ads? Yes, ads. I’ve included some Google ads in the site in a hope that I may be, in some way, merrily reimbursed for the cost of hosting and domain registration. Of course, I don’t like ads when they get in the way of legitimate site functionality, so you will not find ads on every page, and every effort has been made not to hinder Rememberize’s usefulness in any way.

I look forward to any feedback you Rememberize users may have!

A small, end of month update which should be quite useful.

There are two new menu options in the top right corner of the ‘My Sets’ screen. One is a brief explanation of RSS and the security implications, and the other is an RSS feed to your sets themselves. Now you can get a daily updated status report on your sets direct to your feed reader!

The feed tells you how much (percentage) you have learnt for each feed, and a summary of card status. It also provides a quick ‘learn’ link to go straight to learning a specific set.

I hope you find it useful.