Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Creating questions is four easy steps: 1- edit, 2- preview, 3- publish and 4- promote. I made a little video tutorial on how to do it. Since Jing has a 5-minute limit, it is split in two parts. So enjoy and surprise me with your questions!

Part 1
Part 2
















Transcript:
Hello big world!
My name is Bert and today I want to show you how to create questions on the about2findout.com site. Creating questions is 4 easy steps: first you create and edit the question. You fill in all fields on the form, and don't forget to add relevant tags so people can
easily find your question back. Next in step 2 you preview the question. You can go over all options and links just as any user would see them and check if everything is as you want it. Step 3 is an important step where you publish your question. Once published, the question becomes available to anyone and you get rewarded for making a question. In step 4 we offer you some ways to promote your question like for example linking it from your blog or site.

Let's just do it.

Go to the author zone. You can go to anywhere in the site from any page by going to the main menu in the top left corner. It's the little drop down icon. Select author zone. Here you see a list of all the questions you have made. Questions can either be in draft (that means not published yet), published or expired. To create a question, either press the create button or just hover over it and select the question type from the menu.

That brings us to step 1: editing the question. Notice that the 4 steps are listed in the menu on the right side. Fill in the fields. Fields in bold with an asterix are mandatory. You can't have a question without well... a question, can you? Let's fill this in with an example. The assignment should usually be left blank, but you can type in specific instructions. Don't just say: select the best answer. Everyone knows that. For every type of question you can have other fields to fill in here. For a multiple choice question you provide between two and six answer options. The first one you type in is the correct one. When we show this question the options will always be displayed in random order. Also select the language of your question, and very important, select some tags that classify your question. Whatever you do, don't give away the answer in the tags! Because tagging is so important, you can also use the tag assistent. When you click refresh, the tag assistant will parse the text you typed in and suggest some tags to add.
Before filling in other tabs, I recommend to hit the create button. If you want to provide additional information such as feedback to the options, additional settings, type in a little text that explains, or provide links to relevant places on the internet, by all means do so. The quality of your question will greatly improve when you provide additional information. Don't forget to hit the save button before you go to step 2 and preview the question.

In the preview you can go over the question like anyone on the site would see it. The only differences are that it's a green background because you are in the author zone, you can submit several times to try out all possibilities, and you don't get any points for answering. So you see the instruction belongs here. The links you provide are shown here. If you need to go back and make a change, use the menu on the right. If all is well, proceed to step 3, also with the menu.

Before you are allowed to publish, a few checks are made. You also get to select all the publication types of your question. For example, a multiple choice question with one option, can also be shown as a multiple choice question where the user can select more than one option.
You can go back and correct by clicking on step 1, or hit the publish button if all is OK. You get 5 points every time you publish a new question.

The fourth step allows you to promote your question, for example by copy/pasting the URL to your blog or site. Returning to the Author Zone shows us that we indeed have made a new question, with direct linkt to edit, preview or promote. And that's how easy it is to create questions. Remember: quality goes over quantity, so make good questions and provide proper tags and feedback. Don't make 100 questions at once, it's too much work. Personally I try to make one new question a day. I hope to see some of your questions one of these days!

Labels: about2findout, quiz, tutorial

I added a poll to my site. You can now vote on new features on the wish list, and help me to understand what is important to you.

You can find the poll at:
http://bertdecoutere.about2findoutwishlist.sgizmo.com

First I wanted to make the poll with my own survey tool Feedback Server, but somehow the tool got corrupted and doesn't do matrix questions anymore. So I searched for free survey and poll tools on the net. This is a list:

http://www.polldaddy.com/
http://www.surveygizmo.com
http://questionform.com/
http://info.zoomerang.com/
http://polls.blogflux.com/
http://www.dpolls.com/
http://www.pollpub.com/
http://www.vizu.com

Some of these tools are too basic (only 1 question type) or too commercial. I finally selected surveygizmo.com where you can open a free account next to paying accounts. The free account has a lot of options, and furthermore I was pleasantly surprised with the general look and feel and easy of use of the site. (Wish I could do the same :-) )
Happy voting.

Labels: about2findout, poll

In this video I show you how to solve questions on the about2findout.com quiz site.

Transcript:

Hello world once more.
I'm Bert De Coutere and today I'm going to show you how to do it. Solving questions on the about2findout.com site that is.

There are many ways to get a question. For example, you can use the menu at the top of the screen (the little arrow) and select a random question. Or you can go to the questions displayed at the ticker bar right here. On the ticker bar you see new questions made by people. Or you can go to someones profile (let me just show you my own profile quickly) and see the questions there. You can launch one by clicking on its ID right here. Or you go to the quiz zone and there you can search for questions or see questions with a common tag in the tag cloud. It's all good. For simplicity sake, let's go back to the home page and select 'Take a random question'. That should do the trick, don't you think so?

Next we get a question. So select an answer, and click submit. If you don't like the question, you can go to a random other question by selecting skip question.

Next you'll see your score. You get 1-3 points for a good answer, depending on the difficulty of the question. If you answer wrong, nothing happens unless it is not the first time you answer this question wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, but smart people only make them once. So the first time you answer wrong, just learn what the right answer was. Next time you answer wrong again, it can cost you 1-3 points (again depending on the difficulty of the question). You can only get points of course when you are logged in, and you cannot get scored twice for the same question in a 3 day grace period.

So we have a full screen right here, what's on it? First of all your score and if you were correct or not. You see how other people did and if you are logged on.
Next you see the correct answer and your own.
At the bottom you see dots as an indicator of the difficulty of the question. There are three levels of difficulty. You also see who created the question and when. If you like the question, why not click on the author and see what other great questions he or she has for you?
Next you have a button for more information. A popup will show you any additional message the author wanted to give you, and links to popular sites such as google or wikipedia.
The next button is 'share question'. With that button you can get the direct URL link to this particular question, in case you want to include it in your blog or site. The next button either closes the window or selects another random question.

On the right side bar, there are a lot of actions you can take to participate in the site and give your feedback, or send a message to the author. First of all you can rate the question. It doesn't take long, just click on the number of stars you want to give and 'send rating'. You'll make the author happy. Under the box you see all the tags related to this question and clicking on one of them will take you to a list of questions with similar tags.

Finally, you can leave comments on the question at the bottom of the screen. Click show to see or add comments. For example, explain why you were wrong or right or if you disagree with the answer provided or have more information on it.

That concludes how you can solve questions on the about2findout.com site. Have fun!

Labels: about2findout, Jing, tutorial

I've added a new page today: the Hall of Fame. There are 6 different top 10 lists:

• Top 10 most recent questions
• Top 10 most popular questions
• Top 10 best rated questions
• Top 10 most difficult questions
• Top 10 highest score people
• Top 10 highest accuracy people
  

You can access it via the main menu or directly at:
http://www.about2findout.com/a3fo/findout/top10.aspx

Labels: about2findout

As a personal treat to myself, I decided to attend Elliott Masie's Learning 2007 conference in October. I'll do the conference first, fly to Atlanta to meet with my American colleagues and take some holiday afterwards together with my friend (we will drive from Orlando through Miami).

I'm fascinated by how this conference is organized. Just to prove it's not one in a row: the learning network has just launched, where all participants can put in their profile, likes, dislikes and interests and view the 500 closest matches to them to get start networking before the event and afterwards.

When I registered I was number 683, but today the counter is at 1709. I'll keep you posted as the conference approaches.

Labels: learning 2007, masie

In August the magazine EOS surveyed 713 Belgians on their general knowledge of sciences. The survey had 28 questions on general science topics such as technology, universe, health, ICT and history of science.

I've published the questions on about2findout.com. At the moment all questions are available in Dutch and already some in English. I'll translate more later on.

So does the Earth revolve around the sun or is it the other way around?
Try it yourself! You can find back these questions at:
http://www.about2findout.com/findout/search.aspx?tags=eos2007




(Update Dec 20: link updated)

Labels: about2findout, eos, quiz, science

About2findout.com is a quiz site, so getting points for answering questions is a vital part of it. Here are the rules for scoring points:

• Only logged on users can get points, so join for free to keep track of your score!
• You get or loose points when you answer questions.
• If you answer correctly, you get 1, 2 or 3 points depending on the difficulty of the question.
• If you answer wrong the first time, nothing happens because everyone makes mistakes (but smart people only make them once)
• If you answer wrong on the same question again, you loose 1, 2 or 3 points depending on the difficulty of the question.
• There is a grace period of 3 days wherein you cannot get scored for the same question again.
• You get 5 points when you publish a new question.
• You can loose all your points when you are violating the code of conduct.

Labels: about2findout

Yesterday the home page got a new and more simple (I hope) design. Today I revamped the question page. Those two pages are the two single most important entrance points to the site. Most visitors will only see those. I tried to eliminate all clutter (although it hurts so badly to through away things I spent a day or more building :-( ).

Screen asking a question:











Screen showing the correct answer and score:

Labels: about2findout

A favicon is a small icon that is shown in the address bar of the browser, and also when you bookmark the page. Some browers like FireFox show favicons consistently, others like IE have a 'weird behavior' at best.
To add a favicon to your site, create a 16*16 icon and call it favicon.ico. Place it in the root of your site and most browsers will automatically detect it. You can also include it via a link command in the header of each HTML page.
(< rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico">)

I found a very useful site that can create the favicon for you from an image at http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/



The about2findout.com favicon represents a virtual 'F0' key. Just like F1 is the key for help, let's from now on agree that F0 is the key for learning.

Labels: favicon

Sitemaps are little xml-based files that describe the navigation logic of your site. I've used ASP.NET Sitemap components and the associated SiteMapDataSource, Tree and Menu components in the top bar menu of about2findout.com. The whole site structure is written in a file called Web.sitemap, and all navigation components read from it. The file is also localised.

Google also uses sitemaps to index websites, and webmasters can configure their sitemap on the Google Webmaster Central site. It allows the Google crawler robots to better understand your site and what to index. But guess what: the asp.net sitemap xml file and the one Google piloted are not compatible... Luckily, there is a free component on Bertrand Le Roy's blog that converts the asp.net one into one the Google crawler understands. The component is obsolete now because it is in the ASP.NET Futures release, but as I only use stable asp.net releases I'm going to stick with this component until the ASP.NET Futures stuff is released in production.

Labels: about2findout, sitemap

The experimental about3findout.com site is only two weeks live and already the front page got a total, extreme make-over. Both test users I interviewed so far felt completely lost and couldn't tell what the site was about. Shows you just how good I am at usability and GUI design :-).

The new start page still has the information the previous one had, but the screen is more simple and clean. Site navigation has now moved to the brand new top bar that features a menu based on the ASP.NET hover menu AJAX extender. Basic actions for the logged on user are also available in a similar menu, and the score of the user is shown between brackets. The visual indicator for messages is now always present. And the language indicator has changed to a two-letter language image instead of a flag. Other pages will need major make-over too but the start page is the most important one as users decide to stay on your site or not the first 5 seconds of their visit, so I'm told.




[Based on the feedback of Stijn and Ralph. Thanks guys.]

Labels: about2findout, GUI

For the redesign of the homepage, I used web2.0-style buttons from the site My Cool Button. It's an easy site to create buttons in 4 steps. Some examples below.

Labels: about2findout, buttons

About2findout.com - Quiz 2.0 has arrived...

I guess you can best describe about2findout.com as a Quiz 2.0 site. It's a new way of solving trivia questions and scoring points. But you can also create new questions yourself and interact, challenge and compare with your friends and with the world.

The site has four color-coded zones. You can navigate between them with the menu at the top bar of the screen.

• Quiz Zone (pink)
  Anyone can answer questions and get or loose points, search questions or view the question tag cloud.


• Author Zone (green)
  Members can create new questions and get points for that. They can also promote their questions.


• Club Zone (blue)
  You can join the site for free. Members can keep track of their scores, create a profile, become contacts of other members, send and receive messages and compare themselves with their contacts or with the rest of the world.


• Help Zone (yellow)
  In the Help Zone you can find tutorials and frequently asked questions.

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the smartest of us all? It could be you...

Labels: about2findout

The registration and login on the site are pretty much as you will find them all around the Internet. It is based on your user id and password, and the computer can remember you for your next visit. When you don't remember your password, you can recover it via e-mail by answering a security question. The video tutorial below shows how easy it is to create a free account and start collecting points for solving or creating questions.




Video transcript:

Hello again world!
I'm still Bert and in this video I'm going to show you how to join the about2findout.com quiz site and how to logon.From the home page, there are a couple of links you can click to logon. For example here in the middle, or in the quick navigation bar at the bottom of the home page. But let's take the link in the top frame of the screen that says 'login', that should do the job, don't
you think?

The logon page is like any other you will find on the Internet, just type in your user id and password and hit the button. Unless you type in the wrong credentials, you'll be logged in. Since we don't have a profile yet, let's create a new one via the link "Not a member yet? join for free.".

Joining is a short, five step process. It starts by typing in the code you see on the image. This prevents robots from automatically registering fake accounts. We want real flesh and blood people inside! If you have visual disabilities, you can click the speaker button to hear the code out loud. Click next. Second step is to agree with the code of conduct. Basically, we want you to be a good boy or girl. Don't cheat, don't misrepresent yourself, don't be rude. Just be your own likeable self. Click the box to agree and click next. Third step is to select a login name. It has to be 5 characters long at least. If someone else already took the name, you will be warned about that. We advise you to register under your real name.
Fourth step is the most important one. Fill in the form with your password and e-mail. The security answer and password is something only you know and is only used to recover your password. When you forget your password, it can be sent to you via email if you answer the security question correctly. Hit next.
Step 5. We are done. Now we can login and edit our profile. On the login screen, type in your user id and password. I'm also going to check the box to remember me so the next time I go to the site it will remember me and automatically log me on.
Once you are logged in, the top bar on the screen will show your name, and clicking on it
will take you to your profile.

That concludes the overview of joining and logging on.
And remember: about2findout gets better with you inside, so join!

Labels: about2findout

In april I asked readers from my blog for quiz questions. Today I loaded most of them on the experimental about3findout.com quiz site. So go along and try the first 10 questions on the site!
You can leave feedback at the bottom of the page for bugs or suggestions as explained here, or you can comment on the questions themselves after answering them. Have fun!

Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Question 6
Question 7
Question 8
Question 9
Question 10

(Update Dec 20: links updated)

Labels: about2findout, questions, quiz

I got an email from Diigo to check out their newest coolest web 2.0 innovation. They call it webslides and it is basically an animation that presents your favorite bookmarks. Just select a bunch of bookmarks, add some voice or sound if you want to, and that's it. Now people can see the things you like.

When I was visiting the webslides site, I got a 'knowledge accident' and stumbled upon one on e-learning bookmarks "Transforming education through technology" by Maggie Tsai.

Labels: diigo, webslides

On the experimental development site about3findout.com, anyone can leave us comments via the comments box on the bottom of almost every page. The video (made with Jing) shows you how.

Transcript:

Hello World!
My name is Bert and in this video I'm going to show you how you can comment on the development of the about2findout.com project. We need you to tell us what you think of it, and to tell us about bugs, inconveniences, any suggestions, or even just to tell us we're good.

The experimental development site is actually called about3findout.com. On the very bottom of almost every page you will find a section where you can view and add comments.

Let's try it. Type in any text in the box. If you are reporting a bug on the page, be as specific as you can. Note that you can only type in normal characters. If you are an anonymous user, you will also have to fill in the code you see on the picture. If you are logged in to the site, you just have to press the button. We do this to prevent spamming from web robots. As a side note, sometimes the code will be considered wrong due to partial page updates. The best way to leave anonymous comments is to refresh the page and type in the comment before doing anything else on the page.

But also if you don't want to leave a comment, you can help us by deciding on what's important and what's less important. For every comment you can vote and give it a 'thumbs up' or a 'thumbs down'. Comments that get a lot of thumbs up will be higher in the list. That way we will know what you find most important. Anonymous votes count for a little less than votes from registered users, so make sure to sign up for a free account!

Happy commenting!

Video link

Labels: about2findout, beta, comments

I signed up for the free Google Analytics service. It helps you to track all kind of site statistics such as how many hits you have, what pages are the most visited, where users come from, how they found your site and the browsers they use, etc. How it works is pretty simple. Sign up for a free account and paste a small script in the HTML code of all your pages just before the closing /body HTML tag. That's it. The goal of Google Analytics is to optimise web sites for advertisement revenue, but it provides very useful insights for any webmaster.
I've included the script on the master page of my asp.net application so it is automatically present on all pages of the site. It takes 24 hours to get the first reports so I can't tell you yet how the reports look like, but judging from the free tour they seem powerful yet simple. There is also a Google Analytics blog available.

Labels: analytics, asp.net

The start screen centrally features the logo and current tag line ("Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the smartest of us all") of the project. There is also a mirror image I nicked from the Ikea website. (Sorry Ikea, consider it free advertisement untill I get a real graphical web developer on the project.)
The greeting is in a random language.

The top bar is similar to all pages on the site and features the name of the site, of the logged on user, a flag button to change the language of the site, a link to log on or log off and a link to the help section. The site name is either about2findout.com (from December, real site) or about3findout.com (experimental development site, live now). Clicking on it will take you back to this home page. If a user is logged on, the name is shown and clicking on it will take you to the profile page. If a user has unread messages, a little clickable envelope icon is shown centrally on the top bar.

Beneath the logo and tag line area is the ticker area that refreshes every 30 seconds. At present it shows a link to join the site, but as the site is filled it will show messages on recently published questions, recently won challenges, etc.

On the right of the screen is the news area. First is a random piece of general news. If the user is logged on, some personal news like score and accuracy information is shown.

The bottom part of the screen has the quick navigation area with some quick links to pages in the four main sections of the site. The site is color coded and all pages relating to one of the four sections will have matching top and bottom color bars. The four panels are expandable and collapsed by default for logged in users and expanded for anonymous site visitors.

• Find out: searching and solving questions - pink
  
• Author space: making, publishing and promoting questions - green
• Community: profiles, messages, compare with your contacts - blue
• Helping Hand: FAQ, tutorials - yellow
  

Labels: about2findout

The interviews with the early guinea-pig aka testers will follow the following pattern:

1. (icebreaker) Name one of your hobbies or passions.
2. What is about2findout.com in your opinion?
3. Any first impressions you like to share?
4. (guided) Create an account and edit your profile - feedback online
   
5. (guided) Search a question (on your hobby) - feedback online
6. (guided) Make a question (on your hobby) - feedback online
7. Pick a random screen and discuss it for the 3 design principles
   
1. SIMPLE : What would you remove from this screen?
2. SOCIAL : Do you feel alone on this page? Why or why not?
   
3. STYLE : How would you change the layout of this page?
8. (optional) Repeat for other screens
9. What is the most urgent need for the site right now?
   

If you care to give me your feedback on the experimental about3findout.com site, please let me know by sending a note to bert at about2findout.com.

Labels: about2findout

After too many months of solitary programming, I launched a very first version of the site today. It is an empty skeleton that serves as a development site before going live.

The planning:

- Sept-Oct : the experimental site about3findout.com is available for testing
- Dec : about2findout.com goes live

Over the next weeks I will post some articles on how to use the site, and I'll start talking to people to improve, prioritise development and start filling it. I want to have at least 100 questions when going live in December.

I also registered two extra domain names today. About3findout.com will take you to the development site. And quiz20.com is an alias to about2findout.com.

Labels: about2findout

I moved my site from my development computer to my hosted webspace on seekdotnet today. It involved:
- Moving all files from my computer to the web via ftp
- Making the directory where I put them an ASP.NET virtual directory
- Moving the database (SQL Server 2005 Express .mdf file) to the database server via the MDF attachment tool
- Creating the asp.net membership database on that database via the aspnet_regsql tool (as well described on 4GuysFromRolla)
- The tricky part: modifying the web.config file to use a customised provider for membership, profiles and roles. Failing one will lead to asp.net trying to use the default local SQL Server 2005 provider in the App_Data folder. (See MaximumASP.com article)

All in all, it was a quite smooth operation.

Labels: asp.net

From all web2.0 sites, I think Flickr has the most interesting community. A lot of the die-hard visitors are paying members as well. My friend for example got hooked to the site about a year ago and yesterday organised the first Flickr photo shoot in Brussels.
I wanted to show you what the free Microsoft software Photo Story 3 can do for your photo album.
Please find an example of 'Stijn: Narcissism' here. The music is by the Belgian artist Ozark Henry.

Labels: flickr, photo story

Today I can consider myself a modern citizen. And not because I just visited a horse milker (indeed!). But because I am now the proud owner of an electronic identity card or eID. The Belgian government has been issuing these for the past years and withing a few years more everyone will have a plastic bankcard-size identity card with a chip (a smart card).
I also tried to download the Identity Card Runtime 2.6 program from the eID website, but my Aldi Medion computer card reader gives an error.
The eID can be used to declare taxes and for some local municipal applications at present, but when everyone has one, a lot of applications will be developed for it. I was already thinking I would be the last Belgian without one...

Labels: eID