I’ve been running this Chinese word of the day service, http://cn.robrohan.com, since around the end of 2007. It was just a wordpress blog that I would front load a months worth of Chinese (Mandarin) words that would then trickle out daily. Depending on my work load and what I was studying, I may or may not have updated the site.

I got tired of typing in a months worth of words, and started doing a weeks worth, then a few days, then I stopped for a month, then I did a month again… basically the service was pretty inconsistent. I’ve had “automate the thing” on my list of things to do for a while, and I finally got around to doing it last night.

I scrapped wordpress and wrote up my own simple custom thing. I did a nifty new design (well, I like it). I also added twitter integration so if you want to get a Chinese word of the day via twitter you can do that too. You can now get a word of the day in any or all of the following ways:

1) The traditional Mac OS X dashboard widget.

2) A Google Gadget (for iGoogle or the windows desktop using the google side bar thing)

3) By following 小词典 on twitter (there will likely be some sort of fancy integration with the Xiao CiDian iphone app in the future hint hint)

4) Visiting http://cn.robrohan.com from your iPhone or Android based phone (you’ll get a special UI, and can add it to your home screen)

5) Or you can just subscribe to the RSS feed directly in your favourite RSS reader.

The best part is the whole thing is now automated so there shouldn’t be anymore days with no new words (pending server outages and what not).

I’ve had a couple people email me concerned that the words have been trickling out slower than usual… I hope this fixes the problem ^_^.