I practiced with a bunch of HTML tonight, experimenting with my site. I tried out the links in tables and tried to dress them up with CSS.

I think it looks best and is easiest to link to a separate links page and maintain that page separately. I am using TiddlyWiki. It is so cool!

I'm using a flash card program (Mac OS X) to help practice my vocabulary. It is really nice!

http://www.arizona-software.ch/applications/provoc/en/

The developers have been really nice to me - I suggested a certain feature (Multiple Choice Quizes) and they decided to implement it. The put out a new version of the software only a week later!

They are collecting vocab files at their website, so I uploaded my Taiwanese one. I don't have that many words yet (384 so far) but I am going to keep updating the file as I go. Once I get enough words I will also be able to use the program as an effective dictionary.

Once I find a better way to have permantent links on this auto-generated blog I am going to put my ProVoc file up here too. I might use tiddlywiki and just called that my "Links" page.

As I learn how to customize this site, I am going to add links and information and such. It will be interesting to see my site improve.

Here are a few links that come to mind. Really I am just putting them here in post-form until I learn a more permanent way. I imagine I'll play with the site a lot on various weekends so changes will happen on a week by week basis but not so much in the middle of the week. I am still figuring out how to make to links, I'll fix it soon.

iTunes Podcast involving Taiwan:
Misadventures in Taiwan
English Language Taiwan News
Penang Hokkien Podcast
My Taiwanese Podcast

Wikipedia:
Taiwanese Language
PeÌ?h-oÄ“-jÄ«

Others:
Hokkien Language forum

So, I've finally begun!

iTunes is not displaying the unicode characters correctly. I haven't figured out how to fix it yet, but hopefully I will do some of that this weekend.

The romanization system that I use is called Peh-oe-ji, which should really be written PeÌ?h-oÄ“-jÄ«. I am trying to use the tone marks more often, now that I made myself a keyboard layout. I'll talk about that soon enough.

I am thinking about splitting up the different segments of my podcast and just posting them separately. It would be easier to do anything and also it would make me feel more productive to put up several little pieces a week than one big piece. Also, it is easier to single out interesting epsiodes if I don't combine them together.

I have already made a list of ideas that should last a few months at least.

This is the first episode of My Taiwanese podcast

This an a intro and summary of my intentions for My Taiwanese podcast. Since I am doing an enhanced podcast, iTunes users can only subscribe to my podcast - not download a song at a time. I want this intro to be individually playable.