Topic: Features

We just finished putting up another series of updates to the site, including:

RSS feeds everywhere

Dojo Learning now publishes RSS feeds for the following things:

1. All lesson store pages have their own RSS feed you can use to include your lesson list on your own website or blog
2. The newest lessons and most popular lessons lists on the homepage also have RSS feeds of the same
   
3. Each topic has its own RSS feed of newest lessons in that topic

Dojo on Twitter

Dojo Learning now uses Twitter for two things:

1. General updates, news and stuff - http://twitter.com/dojolearning
   
2. Updating users about service issues - http://twitter.com/dojostatus
   

Scribd for files

Dojo Learning now uses Scribd.com's iPaper service to display common file types directly in lessons instead of making you download them to see them. This makes files like Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs much more integrated into the lessons.

We've made a few bug fixes here and there as well, but the above are the most notable changes. Stay tuned for more where that came from! :)

We just made an update to Dojo that all you Mac users ought to like. First, if you're not familiar with Fluid yet as a Mac user, you should be. Go check it out, install it, fall in love with it. Then try making a Fluid app for your Dojo Learning account.

First, you'll notice the icon for your Dojo Learning app is nice and sharp, like you would expect from a proper Mac app:


Next, right click the app once you're logged into Dojo and you'll notice a fancy Dock menu with a few handy quick links available:


That's all for now, but I'm sure we'll be adding more support for 3rd party apps like Fluid over time, so stay tuned!

We've been hard at work on a new tool to help lesson builders promote their lessons, which we just rolled out on the live site a few minutes ago. This feature can be found in two places:

1. As a new icon on your lesson listing page, and
2. As a new "share lesson" link in the lesson itself.

The "Promote your lesson" feature makes it easier to notify people about your new lessons either by email, on your website or blog, or through the various social news and bookmarking services. And with the "share lesson" link in the lesson itself, your existing learners can also share your lessons with their friends or colleagues in the above ways too.

We're pretty excited about this feature ourselves, and hope you find it as "nifty" as we do!

PS. Happy belated Canada Day, and Happy 4th of July everyone!

You can now add learners to your lessons straight from your contacts in Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and more thanks to Plaxo's new "Address Book Access" widget, which we've now integrated into Dojo. This widget essentially hooks your address book directly into Dojo, making it much easier to put the word out about your lessons. Enjoy!

I'm happy to report that late last night we pushed out a tonne of new fixes for various issues within the system, many of which should make our Internet Explorer users happy. We also completed the roll-out of a big Javascript upgrade, from jQuery 1.2.3 to 1.2.6 and jQuery UI 1.0 to 1.5.1, both of which should yield noticeable improvements in stability as well as speed. As an example fo the speed improvements, the release notes for this update to jQuery stated among many other speed improvements that "Events are 103% faster" -- not just a few percent, but over 100% faster. Nice!

We also just finished moving the Dojo source code onto github.com, which is really an amazingly new service, and to using Capistrano to improve the reliability of our updates to the site from now on. I have to say it feels really good to have these updates in place now, since that means a more reliable Dojo for everyone, and faster development of new features as well.

Just added a new feature that lets visitors browse public lessons before subscribing to them, while disabling the chat, lounge, notes and journal input features of the lesson.  If a user wants interaction, they need to subscribe first.

Just a quick update to say that as of today Dojo Learning has secure logins behind SSL available to everyone.  Stay tuned for more improvements in the coming days/weeks!