I would like to have the possibility to link to specific characters in Skritter. That for example www.skritter.com/char=我 would open up the the pracice function for 我. This would also give new ways for people to find Skritter in the first place.

Danwa, that's a cool idea. It would be great to have a quick way to practice characters when desired, say, if I encounter a character word in a book and want to immediately drill it.

Agree - very good idea. Maybe www.skritter.com/practice?char=我+repeats=10 for really drilling a character.

Well for having a specific set of words you want to study (independent of an outside site), the rebuilt cram mode will work best for that I believe. The way I imagine it working in the future is you will be able to create cram lists, just small batches of characters or sections from existing lists, and you can study those subsets anytime you want outside of your normal study, though still recording your studies so items get scheduled accordingly. This should give you plenty more control over what you study.

As for external links, what we have been thinking about is making a button that dictionary sites could have that would say 'Add Word to Skritter' and you click it and it gets added to your study queue. External links like that are a bit more in the future though (so many things to do!) so it might be a while. We'll see though!

A scheme that puts chinese characters in a URL sounds like it would be a "bad idea". My sense from earlier experiments with using Chinese characters in some web dev stuff is that Unicode, as awesome as it is, is still hit or miss in its adoption by different technology platforms, and I'm not even sure if any browsers would know what to do with a non-Roman character in a URL. Using an ID number in the url that corresponds to the database entry for that character would work ok, but then it is no longer easily human-readable and intuitive.

@ itsalljustaride

I have used the suggested approach to automatically create links to characters in Yellowbridge. The link then looks like:

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/character-stroke-order.php?searchChinese=1&zi=傅

No problem with any browser has occured. And the example link also shows what I wish for - a way to _directly_ get to practice the character and see how it is written. But the solution suggested by Scott is also a nice feature.

I haven't thoroughly tested, but I did see problems in IE. It looks like non-IE browsers will escape the characters for you, while leaving it in Chinese in your address bar. If you copy it from a friendly browser's address bar, you might get the encoded version.

You would be able to safely link only with that encoded version, then. Not as nice, that way, but oh well.

Embedding it in the URL doesn't seem like a good idea - I'm only interested in being able to quickly locate and practice a desired character on demand.

I think we've got something nice nice for this that we'll announce tomorrow...

http://blog.skritter.com/2009/06/scratchpad.html

The URL stuff works like this:
http://www.skritter.com/scratchpad?words=你好_中文_写字

So you can separate different words or characters with underscores. However, that URL won't work in Internet Explorer--to make a link that IE will accept, you have to encode it like this:

http://www.skritter.com/scratchpad?words=%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD_%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87_%E5%86%99%E5%AD%97

You can get this automatically by copying the URL out of the Firefox address bar. Let me know if you want a button to create encoded URLs for the current set of words, and I'll add one.

Note that the scratchpad doesn't save your progress on anything. The real cram mode will do that, once it's ready.

Very nice.

Really cool, Nick.

One glitch: when I tried adding multiple-character words to the "river", using the Add Word button, it broke them into separate characters, rather than treating them as a whole word. When I put the whole words in the URL, it worked fine.

I have fixed it, wot.