LingQCentral

Invite Your Friends to LingQ

Mark — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:02:33 -0700

Invite Your Friends

We have just launched our new Invite a Friend and Referral program. You will find the Invite page when you click on the Earn Points link in the top right corner of the site. You will also find links to "Get Free Points" on the Account and Points pages.

You will see that you will be able to cut and paste a referral url into an email or onto a website or blog. Or, you can send an email invitation containing this url, to your contacts from Google, Yahoo or Hotmail or manually enter your friends' emails and send them invitations.

Incidentally, we have also added your referral url to your banners and badges. Therefore, anyone coming to the site after clicking on your banner or badge will also be tracked as a referral.

Earn Points When They Upgrade

Any of your friends who do sign up after clicking on your referral url will be tracked by the system and you will receive 200 points each month for any referral who upgrades to Basic, Plus or Premium Membership. You will receive this referral bonus every month for as long as your friend continues as a Basic, Plus or Premium member.

You can see which of your friends have registered and which of your friends have upgraded, on the Referrals page.

Get your friends LingQing and learning!

New Banners and Badges

Mark — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:50:06 -0700

I am embarrassed to tell you all how long ago it was that Chris from New Zealand suggested we have LingQ signature banners for posting on Forums. Chris, we finally have signature banners! You will see that they show how many words you know in a particular language.

Here are the banners:

You can find banners and badges on the goodies page. You can get to this page by clicking on the new badge above your wall on the profile page. Choose your language and style and then copy the HTML code and paste it to your blog and add it to your email or forum signature.

The banners are bigger and wider, good for websites and forum signature banners while the badges are smaller and narrower, perfect for a blog sidebar.

Here are the badges:

We are really excited about this new way for you to show your friends how you are doing on LingQ! And, of course, it's also a great way to help spread the word about LingQ!

As you try to use these banners and badges please share with the rest of us in the community any good places you put them or tricks you used to get them to fit. I found a few good places and tricks already and will post on those shortly. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these banners as much as I have the last few days while testing them out.

Help Us Win a Design Contest!

Mark — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:43:38 -0700

I have recently entered LingQ in a design contest for our site redesign from earlier this year. The contest is for websites who completed a recent design project using service providers, designers, developers etc.. from Odesk, an online services marketplace.

Help our design win the contest by voting early and voting often! Click on this button to cast your vote.

Winning the contest should help us promote LingQ. Thanks in advance!

Tagging suggestion tool, New LingQ widget on Vocab page

Mark — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:46:34 -0700

We just made an update which included restoring the tagging suggestion tool to the new LingQ widget and replacing the old LingQ widget on the Vocabulary page. Thanks for your patience in waiting for these changes.

New colour schemes and Asian language writing correction

Mark — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:15:22 -0700

A couple of small updates today. We have changed the header colour schemes for a few of the languages. A few of them were just a bit too bright before if you were spending a lot of time there which we hope you are!

We have also implemented proper word counting on the writing submission page for Japanese and Chinese. Please be aware that the word counting does only work once you click the Submit button. The word counter shown on the page is not accurate for Japanese or Chinese. Now, Japanese and Chinese writing will be charged the same way as for other languages - 3.33 points per word submitted.

Library Enhancements and Editor Access

Mark — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:38:14 -0700

We are pleased to announce a bunch of new enhancements in the Library today including the re-introduction of the Level and Accent filters on the Search page. In addition, you will now find that clicking on a lesson in the search results opens the Lesson popup right away instead of taking you to the Collection page. You can still access the Collection page by clicking on the new Collection link in the search results list. We think this is much more convenient for all while still allowing you to go to the Collection if you need to.

You can also filter your results by level and accent now. We realize not many lessons have accents attached but that should change in the future. To help us categorize the libraries and to maintain our content we have now added editor access. We are looking for volunteers to help us maintain our content libraries, let us know if you would like to help and we can set you up as an editor.

Here is the full list of changes in this update:

You can now edit your imported lessons easily by clicking on the Edit link on the Lesson page. It is up beside the Download Audio and Print buttons.
Collection description was added to Lesson popup
Level and Accent filters added to Search page
Lesson popup added to search results page
Lessons at your level show up first on all shelves on Library home page
Editor access available for member editors

Asian Languages Now Working, Library Updated

Mark — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:51:15 -0700

You can now LingQ properly in Japanese and Chinese! We have resolved the longstanding issue with Asian languages and fixed the recent issues caused by our recent update to the site. We hope you enjoy the changes! Let us know of any issues you find. Who knows? Asian languages may have to come out of Beta!

As well, we have made some more changes in the Library. We have removed all filters and search from the main Library page. Now all you see are the different shelves with suggested lessons. You can now also page to the next set of results within a shelf.

All search and filtering will now take place on the search page which you can get to by clicking the Browse the Library link under the page title. We will be adding back the Accent and Level filters shortly.

Finally, the statistics on the Lesson page are now calculating correctly. Known Words should now be working in sync with the Known and I Know All buttons.

As usual tell us how you like the changes and if you encounter any issues.

Honour Roll: July, 2009

Ed Fobes — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:03:20 -0700

Staying rock solid in first place is dillemme with over 6000 points. Peterlaunonen arrives in the top 5 after a few months around the leading group. Ejlife shoots up from eighth to second. Lizstan and krizhna come form nowhere to the top ten. Thanks to jeff_lindqvist, crowderd, VeraI, and alleray for their consistently good showing.

The world is an interesting place these days. We seem to be coming out of a global economic recession. We are reassessing the extent to which humans affect the changing global climate. There are some serious diplomatic issues going on in North Korea. It is at this time that cooperation is needed the most. At LingQ, we are doing our part by helping people create valuable international relationships through language. If we LingQ for our personal future, perhaps we can also help our community and the world become a better place.

Site Temporarily Down

Mark — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:36:07 -0700

We have to make a quick adjustment to the site. It should be back up again in 15 minutes. This should fix some of the problems we've been experiencing.

Major Update - LingQ 2.0

Mark — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:37:13 -0700

We have just pushed a major update to the site. Our team has been toiling for months on these changes and we hope you enjoy the new feel of the site. We haven't changed the look and feel of the site but we have changed the way many of the pages and functions work. We think the new LingQ will be more efficient and user friendly for existing members and more intuitive for newbies.

The Home Page - A Dashboard

We have had many requests for a dashboard displaying key information about your account with convenient access to the key functions. That is what you will find on the new Home page. The Home page replaces the old Welcome page. It's simpler, cleaner and more useful for all members.

At the top of the Home page, you will see your last 5 active lessons as well as the new 4 step progress/task widget for each lesson. Click on each task to see information on it's status and to complete it. Each task will turn red once it's complete. The previous 5 steps have been condensed into 4 tasks, as the Download step has been removed. We still want you to download :-) but it's no longer a task!

The progress/task widget will appear on the Lessons list and on the Lesson page itself. You will see that you can now update your reading and listening counters everywhere you see the task widget. Task 2 is the Vocabulary task and asks you to LingQ unknown words and click the I Know All button when you are done. It will take you to the list of created LingQs for that lesson once you have completed the task. Task 3 still takes you to Submit Writing page until you have submitted but will take you to the correction report after it's ready. Finally, task 4 either displays your current conversation details or, if you have no attached conversation, takes you to the Speak page and automatically attaches the current lesson to whatever conversation you sign up for.

Looking further down the Home page, you will see the last 10 of your Friends' Activities. Click "See all" to go to the Community page to see the full list. This lets you stay in touch with what your friends are doing without having to go to the Community page.

Beneath Friends' Activity you see the My Conversations list which is the same list that appears at the top of the Conversation list on the Speak page. Again, it's more convenient to always see this at a glance on the Home page.

Finally, at the bottom of the page you'll see your recent writing submissions so you can easily submit writing and view correction reports.

You will have a quick snapshot of your weekly progress in the sidebar. We have condensed the Progress Snapshot from the Profile page. For more detail, you can click through to your profile, of course.

Below that we have re-introduced the Top 25 (formerly Priority LingQs) which are the 25 most frequent (important) words you are currently trying to learn. We had many requests to bring this list back, so we did! As words become Known, of course, they are replaced by the next most important words you are studying.

Finally, we see the Tutor Reports list which shows a list of all recent writing, conversation and progress reports you have received.

A New Way of LingQing!

LingQing, the key activity on the site, has been completely reworked. No longer do you have to highlight a word or phrase and then click the LingQ button. Instead, you will see that when you open a Lesson, all New words are highlighted in blue. Existing status 1-3 LingQs are still highlighted in yellow and status 4 LingQs are now underlined with a dotted gray line.

When you place your cursor on a blue word, a popup will appear containing the top 3 User Hints for that word as well as a "New Hint" and "Known" button. You can either choose a User Hint by clicking on it or choose to create a "New Hint" which will open the LingQ widget. That's right! The widget is no longer permanently placed at the bottom of the page. It's like someone opened the curtains! :-) Finally, of course, you can click the "Known" button if you know the word and want to tell the system this.

If you place your cursor on a yellow or gray term you will see the Hint and Phrase for that term in a popup, as well as an option to edit that term which will open the widget.

The next thing you will see on the new Lessons page is the New Words counter in the sidebar. This counter shows you the number of New Words in the Lesson. As you LingQ new words the counter decreases. Once you click the "I Know All" button all remaining blue words will be considered Known and the number will go to zero. This is the same action as the old "Update" button. Below the counter is the new audio player and below that is the list of your LingQs from this lesson. This information will float in the sidebar and follow you down the page as you scroll. That way the counter and audio player are always visible.

There were a few other minor adjustments to the controls on the page. The print and download audio buttons are now just above the text. As well, you will see the new Task/Progress widget in the top right corner. As well, the Lesson Forum now appears under the Tutor Notes and Comments heading at the end of the lesson. That way you can see at a glance any notes on the lesson and quickly add your own comments.

A Better Way to Write

When you go to the Write section you will see that the Writing List has been improved. It's a little cleaner and more condensed. You will also see a significant improvement on the Submit Writing page. No longer is the bottom half of the page taken up by the LingQ widget. The Top 25 is now shown in the sidebar. As well, you will see that you can now select your corrector using a switch just beneath the Submit button. You can even change your corrector from the writing list if you change your mind.

Conversation List Improved

You will see that the Conversations List now displays results by day and by tutor so that it is easier to navigate. You can also use the calendar and tutor filters in the sidebar to find a suitable time more easily.

Library Redesign - The Bookshelf

The Library also has been completely re-designed! We have implemented a bookshelf system. We have tried to show more useful results in the main area of the page and done away with the lists of categories, types, etc... There are no lesson images in this screenshot but it gives you the idea.

In the bookshelf you can click through the different shelves and look at the top 15 results on each shelf. You can see that some of the shelves are based on popularity and others are random selections of different types of lessons. As well, you can see your imported lessons on a shelf, as well as, the Collections that you have chosen from previously. You can even star lessons of interest and then review these lessons on the Starred Lessons shelf.

We have also added filters for Level and Accent. All filters affect the results that display in the shelves. As well, the filters affect the Search results. In addition, you will now be able to preview the audio for all lessons and collections. As well, the new lesson popups make it that much quicker to select a lesson to study. All in all, a much better experience in the Library!

Remaining Changes

There are too many other minor changes and fixes to mention but here are a few notable ones:

A new Active Lessons filter on the Vocabulary page which shows the list of LingQs from all active (not archived) lessons
The imported text limit has increased from 6000 to 10000 words.
The language switch at the top left of the page has been changed and allows the banner to shrink in height allowing more room for the work area to appear.
The course swithc has also been changed and Open Course is now called My Lessons.

Sorry for writing such a long update but we've made that many changes, as you can see! :-) Not much has been left untouched. As usual let us know how you like everything. Happy LingQing!