Site Updates
August 2020
August 23rd, 2020
- New icon, white background and rounded corners
- Website loading performance improved
Navigation updated: The blue menu at the top changes based on the page:
- Series: Shows name of series (e.g. HSK, IC2) and back button
- Flashcards: Show pager, series / deck name / card number and card count
Flashcards:
- Skip to front/back of deck
- Skip between series (when on first/last card and series exist)
Tech diary:
- Site moved to gatsby
- Fully hosted on CloudFront as a static website
- Deployment automated
February 2020
February 16th, 2020
- Add robots.txt / sitemap
February 9th, 2020
- Image compression via webpack
- Use font awesome 5 via svg
- Support injected fa tags via reStructureText in django-docutils
- Caching for graphql via query/variable hash
February 8th, 2020
- Break components / routes up
- Font awesome 5
- Accessibility tweaks (e.g. doctype, alt tags in images)
- Browse: Debounce input field to fix lag
February 3rd, 2020
- Responsive UX fixes
February 2nd, 2020
- Rewritten in React + Relay (graphql) + React-Navi
- Pages autoload in background
- Removed usage of heavy django template logic and based (mostly)
February 1st, 2020
- Update Django to 3.x
December 2019
December 29th, 2019
Move packaging pipenv -) poetry
Remove based (no more entangled monolith tying this thing down)
Internal renames, in preparation for new website:
Renamed "Deck" to "Series"
e.g. HSK is a Series
Renamed "Collection" to "Deck"
e.g. HSK Part 1 is a Deck inside the HSK Series
December 28th, 2019
Based:
- Decouple into python package
- Port over ux from based -) this website
December 27th, 2019
Based:
Open source reStructuredText parts into
tony/django-docutils
Remove gfx, taxonomy, user parts
These were tangled ORM parts / constrained by templates
December 7th, 2019
Based:
- Update npm packages, including raw-loader
- Minor python package updates
November 2019
November 29th, 2019
Based:
- npm package updates
November 28th, 2019
Based:
- Remove TOML lexer, pygments includes already
- Fix regular expression issue effecting code snippets
November 17th, 2019
Based / Internal:
- flake8 fixes via autoflake, black, isort
- python 3.x updates via pyupgrade
October 2019
October 22nd, 2019
Based / Internal:
- Move webpack configs to typescript
- Update npm packages for bulma, etc.
- Webpack: Use chunk splitting for django-webpack-loader
- Static files: Serve from cloudfront
October 21st, 2019
Internal updates:
- Update webpack, node-sass, update to node 12.x
- Update django and django-related packages
Dictionary:
- Fix bug displaying dictionary with django-filters
August 2018
August 25th, 2018
Internal updates:
- Run python code through black
- Run JS code through prettier
July 2018
July 7th, 2018
Internal updates:
- Update Python dependencies
April 2018
April 28th, 2018
- Update from bulma 0.6.2 to 0.7.1
April 8th, 2018
- Update from webpack 3.x to webpack 4.x
March 2018
March 18th, 2018
- Update dependencies
March 6th, 2018
- Update Django (security release)
February 2018
February 19th, 2018
- Update packages
January 2018
January 15th, 2018
- Upgrade bulma to 0.6.2
- Remove Roboto webfont, rely fully on system fonts
December 2017
December 8th, 2017
- Upgrade to Django 2.0
November 2017
November 28th, 2017
- Added progress bar at top of page when loading new content
- Restructure template system to port PJAX into based
November 15th, 2017
- Fix links to PlecoDict 2.0 files which were broken for some decks
November 7th, 2017
- Internal updates to webpack configuration to re-use common build information
November 3rd, 2017
- Update styling of headers and text
November 2nd, 2017
- Fix search
October 2017
October 30th, 2017
- Improve resilience of 404 URL's
- Fix issue where pjax would bind to downloads
October 29th, 2017
- Move static content pages to reStructuredText
October 28th, 2017
Massive refactor of template system and pjax.
This add pjax support (fast page transitions) to the CHANGES pages
Fix inconsistencies when flipping between site pages and flashcards
Internally refactor search and directory into its own application
October 27th, 2017
- Get scrolling navbar working on updates page
- Port old updates from the about page over
October 26th, 2017
- Start noting updates
August 2017
August 30th, 2017
- Performance: Static files are now served through S3
- Look at feel: Switched web framework from Bootstrap to Bulma
- More internal code cleanup to make maintenance easier(/li)
April 2017
April 22nd, 2017
- Breadcrumb navigation shows full name of card set instead of acronym.
- Breadcrumb navigation shows the total lessons/cards.
March 2017
March 13th, 2017
- Improvements for browsing flashcards on mobile devices.
March 3rd, 2017
- You can now use a search bar to find chinese characters by english definition, simplified, traditional and pinyin. The search bar on the top right can initiate a search from anywhere on the website.
March 2nd, 2017
You can now browse chinese character by pinyin using the english alphabet. It will search through all possible tones / diacratics for you. Use the "Pinyin" field. So search "wo" can match any tone of wo.
January 2017
January 29th, 2017
- Default font is now Roboto (was using Verdana earlier).
January 28th, 2017
- Upgraded to Bootstrap 4
- More internal cleanup
January 27th, 2017
The Cleanup
- HSKFlashcards has been updated internally to faciliate development of new features for exploring 中文!
- Bootstrap has been updated from 2 to 3. Django has been updated from 1.4 to 1.10. The codebase has been cleaned up significantly and work will continue over the next few days.
- In addition, social networking will be reintegrated into the site for Twitter and Facebook
April - October 2012
The New HSKFlashcards
Over the past 5 months I have spent weekends and late nights trying to fill my own technical debt. Alchemy is when we turn matter into something useful. What is matter lies in the perceiver - a vacuum or void is space with time is matter to the hermetic hacker. The best material to repay technical debt is inherit invested effort from a prior generation. Nature's grace gave me the fortune of meeting Jacob, thanks is owed to him for his time making the original site a reality. Not only to him, my teachers, the nobel people who gave us permission to use their content, the sages and long-forgotten who undertook preserving Chinese culture and the open source community.
Our deeds, discipline and actions are not coincidental, we're a model for bringing order out of chaos, taxonomy out of mess, hope in a hard world, light to darkness, truth to lies, depth to shallowness, so as to create fixed stars in a world where people roam so lost. We do what we do not out of pride but expectation for what we leave after us. I hope this method and its fruits will be passed down to the generations to nourish.