Important New Features

A few weeks ago, Stuart, one of the indonesian-online subscribers, wrote to me complaining that
“it is quite difficult to keep track of what lesson has been completed and get an understanding of how you are going.”

No doubt, Stuart is right, and this shortcoming has bothered me for a long time. So I took his suggestions by heart and asked my developer whether he could come up with a solution.

So, this is what he has done: 1.) First of all, in the navigation list in the sidebar where all lessons are listed by number, all lessons that you visited before, are highlighted in red. Look at the picture, Here it is indicated that I already looked at Lesson 48, but none of the other Bahasa Indonesia lessons.

This alone is already very helpful. But the developer did more: 2.) Now, by default, whenever you log in to Indonesian Online, it takes you back to the page that you last visited.

Without any doubt, content-wise Indonesian-Online stands well above all its competitors. Even big names such as Duolingo, Babbel, or Rosetta Stone, fade when compared against Indonesian Online (content and price-wise). However, when it comes to design, these companies often do have an advantage.

This is mainly due to the fact that most coding is done by myself, the principal author, with the assistance of Age, who is located in Bandung, and who also runs the tutorials.

Hiring a developer is expensive and with the limited revenues at our disposal, we typically hire a developer only when my limited expertise in html doesn’t allow me to do something myself.

With the implementation of these new functionalities, we should have narrowed the distance to our competitors.

Remember where to log in and log out? Right on the main page it says Login/out in big letters as can be seen on the image.

Once you are logged in, a pop-up window will appear where you type in your credentials: your username or your email address, and your password.

Do you see “Remember me?” in the image to the left? If you check this box, you will not be logged out for the next 60 days. I use this all the time as I hate to be logged out too soon, but this method also has its drawbacks.

Obviously, you don’t want to activate this on a public computer. You should also NOT activate this if you want to take advantage of our new feature which will remember the last page you have visited. Remember that it will only take you back to the last page before you logged out.

So it’s probably a good idea to log out once you are done for the day.

And a final note, an alternative way to log in, which comes very handy in case the front-page login does not work (which can happen), is by typing in:

This is the most reliable way to log in and out, or change your password.