A Little Bit About How Bounties Are Processed

Today I spent a good portion of my day migrating the TextFugu “bounty program” over to a brand new system that should make things oh so much easier to keep track of (the other half of the day was spent going through all the bounties – lots of catch up to be done after getting back from my funeral leave). Before, I would get your e-mail, and then put it on a spreadsheet, and things would get all jumbley. Now, I’m using an actual ticket capturing system which will allow myself (and others) to coordinate bounty checking without stepping on each other’s toes. I’m so happy for the new system, which should solve a ton of problems that existed before. Continue Reading →

PHP Amateur At Work

You may have noticed some “strange” (but very useful) changes going on. Now, if you’re logged in you’ll see different things from those that are logged out (which means you should log in!). When you’re logged in, you will no longer see so many “buy now” buttons, and you’ll have a little button at the bottom of your screen that lets you post a bounty from any page! How convenient.

I’m also spending the next 9 days going through Season 1 and Season 2 to make them better, streamline some things more effectively, and overall just make the experience better for all of you learning Japanese. Thanks to all the response I’ve gotten so far from you guys, I think I’ve also figured out my key demographic: Self-learners of Japanese. This is a really tough group, but nobody else really caters to them, I think. I’ve already done a lot of things with TextFugu to help keep self-learners motivated, but now I’ll be able to focus on that much more to make the experience for self-learners of Japanese so much better (and non self-learners won’t have any problems either, if you’re out there!).

I’ve also gotten a little bit of help on the customer service side, so if you send us a message, hopefully you can expect to get a quicker (and more pleasant than me) response. Of course, you can still always e-mail me directly.

Coming up:

Going through chapters one-by-one and making content / usability adjustments. You’ll start to see sub-chapters pop up one at a time on various chapters to make your life easier (especially when going back and re-reading something specific).
New worksheets: I’ll be re-doing all old worksheets to streamline them with a new “style” – content won’t really change in these, so don’t worry, just want to go back and pretty up old worksheets and make them easier to use.
Talking with users. I won’t be doing this right away, but starting in February I’d love to talk to some of you and learn more about how you use TextFugu and what you like / don’t like about it. This will help me make a better product, and market it more effectively!

Of course, there’s a lot more than that going on, but those are the main things I’m focusing on this week. Cheers and thank you to all of the support so far!