I don't know how you could do this, but...
I really liked how the newer Rikai could look up words just with hiragana, while the older one mainly only looked up kanji. This worked great, especially when I foudn words not using their kanji. Is there anyway you could set that back up, but still be useful to others? Or maybe you could have 2 different Rikai XD.
Either way, I love Rikai and it helps me out a lot. Thank you!
 

As a regular and very appreciative user, I was a little puzzled by the new lookup method when it first appeared, especially the "checking" message or whatever it was that kept appearing. But when I took the time to realise what had changed and selected the lookup on request mode, I liked the new interface much better.

I hope you can get it debugged and operational again soon. But you may need to alert users to the new options and provide some basic tips on use.

Thanks for a marvellous tool!
 

A little unrelated to this topic, but as long as you are working on a new version, I thought I'd pass this idea along.

Why not make your main page simpler and faster to download, sort of like www.google.com's main page.

I imagine that your server is busy sending a lot of data and visitors do a lot of waiting for things that don't get read. Just a simple "more..." link sort of like google does, could easily direct your (new) users to other things you have available on your website.

You could also add the option of using the full page as you have it now from a different URL. Maybe call it "full startup page" or "advanced version startup page".


Anyway, keep up the good work. Your website sure makes reading Japanese easy (less tedious, thus fun), so I've been reading a lot more Japanese and my Japanese has been improving quickly.

Thanks.
 

I do like google's homepage a lot for esthetic reasons, but then again my own page is cached for 1 hour (the word-list uses javascript) and loads quite quickly anyway. From my machine the load-times look like:

www.google.com: approx. 1.2 secs.
www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl: approx. 1.0 secs.
www.rikai.com: approx 1.4 secs. (involves a redirect)

Now depending on your browser, it may then take a moment to render, but I don't think there's much to be gained by making the html simpler.
Now with the new method the load-time was even faster, but IE took quite a while to run the javascript. Mozilla/Firefox was like lightning. Other browsers didn't work really fast!

Does the Rikai front-page seem slow?