UsingEnglish.com Site News

On Friday 1st July 2011 from 19:30 - 23:00 BST we will be performing some system maintenance and as a result we expect that there may be periods during which the site will be unavailable.  We hope to have the maintenance completed quickly but if you find that the site is not responding, or is otherwise misbehaving, please try again outside of this time period.  We will keep you posted if any of the details change, and you can get up-to-the-minute updates by following us on our Twitter feed here:  http://twitter.com/UsingEnglish.

Please accept our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused.

Thanks,

The UsingEnglish.com Team

A new and expanded PDF Lesson Plans section has recently been launched which brings you an improved user interface and allows easier navigation of our free downloadable PDF lesson plans and handouts.

We've just launched an upgrade to the idioms section of UsingEnglish.com that makes it much simpler and easier to use.

Whilst this blog has remained quite for long periods of time, it doesn't mean that work and new developments on the site have stopped.  Far from it.  The server and the site are continually monitored, optimised and improved.  The main reason for the quietness is that, on the whole there's not a lot to show for this work on the site's interface.

Here's a case in point:

Last night at around 22:30 in the evening I implemented a little trick to help speed up access to the site. I configured the site to utilise caching in a more optimised and efficient way.  It seems to have worked, for me at least.

After months of experimenting with new designs and creating different versions of UsingEnglish.com we've finally settled on a new look for our site and we hope you like it!

We've just added the ability for you to quiz yourself on intransitive, separable and inseparable phrasal verbs. This quiz type complements our existing quizzes on phrasal verbs and other grammar topics.  We hope you enjoy them.  :-)

The Site Diary has been quiet for some time now, but there has been a lot of work going on behind the scenes to improve UsingEnglish.com and to build a base for the future. Here I will attempt to catalogue the key developments that have been made to the site over the last few months, and explain what they may mean for the future.

UsingEnglish.com helps the fight against spam by using Captchas on many of the forms we have on-site. As of today, we've started used a superb new service that not only fights spam, but helps digitise old books at the same time.

Our new Idioms News Feed allows you to keep updated and ensure you are instantly alerted of all the latest idiom definitions added to UsingEnglish.com.

Just a quick note to say that our Advanced Text Analyser now includes a Graded Text analysis section. You can now compare your text to the BNC and GSL word lists and discover more about the reading level of the text. More information about this will follow shortly.