We've been working hard to database all of our text and article content. This will provide us with much more opportunity in the future to add functionality to the site to help you learn faster and find content of interest to you. We now have three fully databased articles areas:
Expect to see new features for our article content in the near future. There are many obvious next steps to make, such as enhancing the navigation of these sections by sorting and searching, displaying related articles and tagging. There will even be some surprises to come as a result of the databasing of these texts, but if you have any ideas and suggestions we'd love to hear from you. Post your comments below or send us a suggestion.
We've completely redesigned and redeveloped the system we use for integrating PDFs into our site. As a result, we also now have the ability to add Audio clips to content. You can already see the new PDFs becoming available in our Teacher Lesson Plans section. Expect to see new Audio MP3 content added to site sections like our English Idioms in the near future!
One of the major developments of the past few months has been the complete restructuring of the profiles area. We now not only list the individual profiles of our staff and site contributors, but we also provide you with the ability to access the content they have contributed to the site. Simply click on the Contributions tab from their profile to see a list of everything they have added to UsingEnglish.com.
We have been accepting user-submissions of content to the site for a while now, and we are very thankful for all of the hard work and time that some people have put into contributing their content to UsingEnglish.com. As a result, any site user who submits content to the site (such as idioms) now has a personal profile page which lists all of their contributions. Any entry contributed by one of our users is linked directly to their profile page in order to credit them for their work.
Expect to see the contributor profiles develop and mature over the next few months, with added functionality and enhanced navigation.
What use would all of this wonderful new content be if nobody saw it?
That's exactly what we were thinking. Therefore, we are creating RSS feeds for as many types of content as possible, allowing you to subscribe to the sections of the site you are interested in and get updates as and when new content is added. We currently have the following feeds available (you can subscribe to them here):
Expect to see this list grow, with new feeds for more types of content such as articles, PDFs and more.
Still reading? Thanks for taking the time to get this far, and I hope you can see we've not been sleeping on the job.
We hope you enjoy these new features of the site as they continue to grow and get enhanced over time. We are committed to bringing you the best we can offer, and we dedicated to providing a site that suits the way you want to use it. Whether you are a teacher or student, we want to make UsingEnglish.com easy to use, helpful, informative and enjoyable.
So, now it's your turn. What do you think of these changes? What do you want to see UsingEnglish.com do in the future? Please add your comments and thoughts using the comment form at the bottom of this post.
]]>Captchas are a way of giving a test (or challenge) that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. This means that spammers will find it much harder to abuse any form which includes a captcha.
So How is reCAPTCHA Different?
This is the good bit.
With reCAPTCHA, the words and numbers presented come from scanned books. By entering them in, you can help to digitise old texts. These texts, at least in part, come from the Internet Archive which currently contains 280,330 digitised texts.
This seems like such a sound concept that we've decided to convert as many forms as possible on UsingEnglish.com to use this system. You can see an example in action on our Contact Us page.
What a great initiative!
]]>Simply click the following link to begin:
]]>Handouts have been redesigned so that they no longer open in a new window, and we've added a Print This Page button to make printing the exercises easier.
New navigation links mean that you can now switch easily between the teacher handout view, the online quiz view and the answer sheet for each exercise.
If you have any comments or suggestions about these changes, please feel free to drop us a line via our contact form.
Regards,
Red5
]]>We are working on adding more exercises, and more ways to view them. As this section is still a Beta release you should expect to see changes and additions fairly frequently. Watch this space!
]]>If you already have a copy of the software, you can update your verb list simply by downloading the Verblist.zip data file (instructions are available on the above page).
]]>* Tabbed Interface - Making it simpler to understand and easier to navigate
* Analysis History - Save your analysis results to your personal history
* Phrase Analyser - Examine phrases found in a text
* Online Help - Definitions and descriptions to help you understand the results
If you need more help with anything to do with using this text analyser, or about analysing texts in general, you can use our Text Analysis and Statistics Forum where our staff and members will be happy to help.
]]>Your patience is appreciated.
Red. :-)
]]>Please feel free to give us your views on the section, or make suggestions for improvement using our contact form.
]]>You will also notice that other individual pages have had facelifts.
We hope you enjoy the changes, and if you have any comments or suggestions feel free to let us know - we've even started a discussion specifically for your comments: Do you like the recent changes to this website?
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