New website look
It was maybe a week ago I noticed the new website look. The changes are minor. I chose to get screen shots of the desktop view in chrome because the desktop view has the most fun stuff on it.
I put a red rectangle around the new or rearranged things. If you click on the streak you get the calendar, which I don't think used to be here. The one thing I miss is the notifications. I used to get notified of a new follower, and of the 10% gems bonus on the tens.
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I like the weekly XP progress chart very much. They got rid of a similar chart on the app layout for me because I'm in schools. It's pretty useful. 300 XP is a good target because it usually means: 15 lessons and two timers. Saturday was a bonkers day because I had the half hour timer due to Friends Quest and I did the timer during Happy Hour. I did ten lessons in Happy Hour and nine of them were on the timer. That means 50XP for doing lessons in Happy hour and 45 of those fifty doubled due to the timer.
Monday was not a good Duolingo day but I had jury duty & I didn't feel like doing any lessons at the courthouse. On Tuesday I missed a timer, c'est la vie. I think I did a dozen lessons on each of those two down days. I just feel more motivated to do lessons under gimmicks.
Profile Page
I like to check the profile page maybe once a day. A subset of notifications that I get on the news feed are available in the Friends Update tab. Here is where I can see if I got a new follower if my memory is good. About a month ago I blocked 15 IDs to get the number down to 140. I blocked ids that weren't active for a while (-- I checked them on Duome). I figure if they ever come back they won't remember me so nothing is lost; and the likelihood of them coming back anyways is miniscule.
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Of the 28 I followed, 27 followed me. One guy I followed because I think we have the same last name, and he didn't follow me back because he probably can't figure out why I follow him. He's never followed anyone on Duolingo as far as I can tell. Vingt-huit is a good number because that's the number of reactions I got the last time I got something on the news feed. Half of the 28 reactions came from people who I followed.
Achievements
I checked the achievements on the web and noticed the new-fangled achievements are not there.
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The lavender circle with the ellipses has some useful things that I didn't get screen shots of. I can adjust notifications, change settings like the daily goal, and go to schools, podcasts, and the help center. The big thing I would like them to do with podcasts is have a list of all of them on the French course so I could tick them off as I complete them. The second thing is to fix the written transcripts when they don't match the audio.
Using the web
I mainly use the web for my first two lessons of the day. For the first lesson I get that enormous lingot award on the tens. The second one gives me my daily goal and a lingot award. It's kind of cheating because Friends Quest usually has 50 XP as the first quest.
I set the daily goal to 20 to get lingots on the web for meeting the daily goal. I then get gems on the app for meeting the Quest Goal that is 50 XP. I think it's a good thing to at least do two lessons a day on the web.
I also use the web for the practice lessons on the snake because it used to award only five XP on the app for them. It's those practice lessons that somewhat bridge the gap from three levels on the snake to the old five levels on the tree, so they shouldn't be worth 5XP. I should check to see if they fixed that, but I'm reticent to do so because XP on the lesson complete screen is not equal to the XP awarded in Duo for schools & Duo Me on the App.
Sometimes I'll do regular lessons on the web too because the XP is the same. The capstone review, I'll usually do that on the app because of the timer reward.
Sometimes I get ten extra XP to write about a story. I wish they kept those on file. I know I've written better recaps of stories over time. I think that function, to write about stories, is on the web.
One thing I miss is the speaking mode for stories but you can't have everything. The other thing I miss from the tree is the checkpoint quizzes. Both were web-only functions in 2022 until the snake dropped them.