That's the third time I've seen that today, you guys must be busy. Maybe you could change that message and tell us the new goodies you've added...

Sorry about that; my upload process, which had been broken on Google's end all morning, finally went (when the code happened to contain an error I'd put in to test some error handling). So I fixed that immediately, but then there was a weird bug with secure and non-secure items that I could only test in production. That should be resolved now.

It's true that the intent is to minimize live uploads so practice isn't disrupted by those messages. There are still a few cases where we have to test live, though. Hopefully we'll keep decreasing upload bursts as we finish those.

The main goody I'm working on is a secret, I'm afraid! I have fixed several bugs, though, like being unable to select ChinesePod lists, and a weird bug that was messing up everything on the practice page sometimes, when you first loaded it.

Glad that unable to select ChinesePod lists is fixed - it was a bit of an odd one.

Is there any way to input a a new character to practice right away so I can use skritter to figure out stroke orders for new characters I'm learning on Chinesepod?

You can check stroke order (simplified) from all the english based dictionaries. Nciku is my choice.
http://www.nciku.com/

Traditional? I have no idea.

for traditional, http://www.cchar.com
for simplified, http://www.archchinese.com
for Kanji: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1B

Wow. Arch Chinese also supports traditional characters: http://animation.archchinese.com/