ダニーの日本語

If you look to the right, at the top of the sidebar, you should see a new widget that is both exciting and attractive – a tracker to monitor my progress through Heisig’s two Kanji books, RTK1 and RTK3.  The strange numbering owes itself to the second book containing the same kanji as the first, but giving the readings – something which is not recommended in the AJATT system, where readings should be approached as they are encountered in the context of a sentence.

Anyway – yes – so – I thought a Heisig tracker would be a nice thing to have, and I couldn’t find one already out there, so I knocked something together this afternoon.  It doesn’t do anything clever (like get its values from Reviewing the Kanji, which would have been awesome, but I couldn’t find an API to let me get that information), it just adds two boxes to the admin page where you can enter the ID of the last Kanji you learned in Heisig, and it will write it up in your sidebar.  There are checkboxes to hide or display the individual works (RTK1 and RTK3).  That’s it.

Having stressed that it’s just been thrown together, isn’t very clever, and might require a bit of hacking to get it working with your particular WordPress theme, I’ll now make it available to all and sundry.  If you’d like a nifty Heisig tracker on your site, all you have to do is follow these instructions:-

• Download and unzip this PHP file.  This is the plugin itself.  It’s pretty simple, so you should be able to modify it to suit your needs if it comes to that.
• Upload it to your webspace in the folder wp-content/plugins.
• Go to the WordPress dashboard, and find the Plugins admin page.  This is the first item in the 「プラグイン」 menu if you’re using Japanese WordPress.
• Find “Didi’s Heisig Tracker” and click “Activate” to the right.  In Japanese this is 「使用する」.
• Now find the Widgets (ウィジェット) page, and you should see “Heisig Tracker” in there, ready to use.

Any troubles, leave a comment.  Enjoy!