Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

I've experimented with Google Gadgets. Gadgets are little pieces of web applications that you can plug into your personalized home page such as iGoogle or add to the Google sidebar.

The one I made simply lists a random trivia question, taken from the about2findout.com database, and refreshes it every 5 minutes. If you hover over the questions you get the full question and question type, and there's a button to show another random question. Plain and simple.
Clicking on the question will open a new browser window on the site itself where you can do the question as you usually would. I choose not to implement the answering logic in the gadget itself because that would make things much more complicated, and I need people to go to the site to answer questions otherwise I loose all statistics and tracking of answer questions.

There is a very nice tutorial on creating Google Gadgets here:
http://www.seoish.com/how-to-make-google-gadgets/
I especially like the interactive part where you add gadgets with video explanation next to the Google Gadget editor. Google Gadgets are nothing more than xml files that describe the gadget's properties and logic. The logic can either be written in javascript, or redirected to another URL, and that last option is what I've done. It saves me the trouble of having to rewrite everything in javascript, but especially allows for people that are logged in to keep their credentials via the normal way. There is more detail on Google's Code site on creating and publishing gadgets.

This is the first of what I hope will be many ways to open up the site to the rest of the web. About2findout.com was never meant to be a locked database. After the screens, I've implemented a module to randomly generate 20 questions every minute. It's that module that feeds the Google Gadget and any other way of sharing I'll add in the future. It keeps the calculations on the site down (although I don't know how this behaves under heavy traffic), and avoids bots to suck out all questions and answers from the site. There are only 20 questions per minute. Should be enough for the real people among us.

To check out the Gadget or add it to your page:
Add to iGoogle
Add to webpage

Labels: about2findout.com, gadget, googlegadget

On widgetbox.com, you can create and share widgets. Widgets are small parts of web pages that you can insert in your site, blog, personal homepage such as iGoogle or NetVibes or social site such as Facebook.

Creating the widget based on the RSS feed of my quiz site was fairly easy. Not sure what I can do with the widget now, but hey, at least I have a widget shared with the world :-).

Labels: about2findout.com, widget

We passed the 1500 questions mark on the site today!

Labels: about2findout.com

The home page of about2findout.com is renewed. First of all, there is a new slogan for the site. Instead of 'quiz 2.0 has arrived', it is now 'what do you know?'. The main page still has the same general navigation at the top, but the search link is now on the right top accessible anywhere. The center of the new home page has two colored pieces: one for the quiz zone and one for the author zone, with many direct useful links. Every 30 seconds, a new random question and associated author are shown.

Another new feature is the page 'All questions', that as the name suggests shows a list of all published questions in the database. You can order the list by clicking on the column headings, and you can filter it by language and filter out questions you have already done.

Last but not least, there is a 'Tell a Friend' page that allows you to send an e-mail message to invite a friend to check out the site.

The Hall of Fame page shows the 50 highest scores by default, or the 50 highest accuracies, 50 most recent, most difficult, most popular or best rated questions. And when you have answered a question, the left bar shows a link to the quiz the question is part of, if any.

Labels: about2findout.com

Today about2findout.com reached 900 questions. Up to the 1000 milestone!

Labels: about2findout.com, news

This month, the site had 2731 visitors that did on average 7 pages per visit and came from 83 countries. The top visiting countries are in order: USA, India, UK, Belgium, Canada.

The most popular quiz was the Capitals quiz. In April 17 quizzes, 46 new people and 139 questions were added to the site, and Dailydog had the top score, and India was the top scoring country. Except for 1 week, there were no special advertisement or other promotion campaigns. The peak on April 26 I guess is because of a lot of StumbleUpon traffic that day.

Labels: about2findout.com, news

About2findout.com is over 800 questions big now. Number 800 is part of the 'Yet another science quiz'. There are over 200 people and 70 quizzes now.

Thanks to all the people who contributed questions and quizzes so far, and please keep 'em coming.

Labels: about2findout.com, science

Last night I added a quiz on one of the most popular things around: the iPhone. I don't own one, but I played with it when I was in the US last year. One day I hope to find the time to write a mobile version of the about2findout.com site, that you can view on the iPhone or other mobile devices. One day...

Labels: about2findout.com, apple, iphone, quiz

So how did the site do in the last month? As always, an update on the latest numbers, brought to you by the free Google Analytics service.


- The site visits went up again to 3776 visits, for 7.85 pages per visit on average. That makes almost 30.000 page views. 83% are new visits.
- The top day was 25 March with 373 visits. That day the site was listed on the Museum of Modern Beta blog.
- Top 5 countries are United States, India, Italy, United Kingdom and Belgium.
- Most popular quiz was the one on Confusing Words.
- 15 new quizzes, 84 new members and 139 new questions were added to the site.
- 59% internet explorer, 38% firefox

So March was a good month, but I wished I found some more time to bring you new features. April looks busy too, but I'll do my best.

Labels: about2findout.com

I'm very happy to see that the site gets listed in web 2.0 directories, and gets reviews. Here are some of last week (BTW, in case you are wondering, Technorati is my spy).

Got listed on a German site:
http://www.web2null.de/about2findout

And on this one:
http://diystartupnews.com/2008/03/25/about2findout-beta/
Like the comment 'the pub quiz without the pub'.

And on Techie-buzz they say:
About2FindOut is a site which quizzes you on various topics, it allows community members to answer quizzes as well as solve it. So if you are a avid solver of quizzes head there and solve quizzes or create some cool ones and share them with others.

There is an article and review on socialtake.com that I like to quote from:
"Why it might be a killer - This trivia site will agree with thinking minds all over the world. The quizzes actually make you think, unlike other game sites out there. Plus, you’ll get to compete against other people, make challenges, and find out if you’re really the fab brain you think you are." Indeed, I do hope people learn some things (also about themselves) when they are on the site. They also end with a very pertinent question "Are questions vetted in any way? How accurate are the answers?". I might need to work further on that one, but for the moment people can send a message to the author and administrators with the link 'I think it is wrong.' The author can then reply or change his question. Administrators can also edit all questions. So far this has worked well, and on the 700 question I guess about 10 have been corrected so far.

Finally an article on two Italian sites (that I can't read unfortunately):
- http://blog.atuttonet.it/applicazioni-web/about2findout-crea-i-tuoi-quiz.php
- Geekissimo

Labels: about2findout.com, blogrol

The site got listed on March 25 on the Museum of Modern Beta blog. Saurier Duval maintains this list of web 2.0 sites that are typically in perpetual beta.

And speaking of the Museum of Modern Beta, here are some entries related to learning 2.0:

Schoolfinder

SchoolFinder places K-12 school information at your fingertips, enabling you to search and compare public, private, charter and online schools

Edmodo.com
The free communication platform for education.
As discussed on : http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2008/03/edmodo-microblo.html

Learn it lists
learn a little every day

Labels: about2findout.com, MoMB, museum of modern beta

Two days ago, I was on easter holiday spending a few days in the youth hostel on the Dutch island of Texel. It was snowing (yes, indeed, at Easter of all times!) and it's a little island so I bought a 5 euro hour on the Internet to make a new quiz on my site. Oh horror: I could not login. Only when I cleared the 'remember me' box on the login page, I could access the site. That has probably something to do with persistent cookies or other food, but then it hit me: so that is the reason why so many new users on the site don't fill in their profile page or have a 0 score! All people on Internet kiosks in Internet cafes probably have problems logging in. So I changed the behavior: the 'remember me' box is now by default unchecked. It will help everybody to log in. But for people returning to the site, they'll have to provide their userid and password again, except when they check the box.

Labels: about2findout.com, cookie, login, remember me

I made 5 video tutorials and put them in the help section of the site. At the same time I adapted the help section to look like the rest with a navigation box on the right. The screen capture videos are made with a free copy of the previous version of Camtasia that you can get from TechSmith. Camtasia is market leader in their segment, and it shows. It was very easy to make the captures, and to convert them to AVI, flash or WMV video. For the links below you need the Windows Media Player.

Video 1 : How to solve questions and quizzes on about2findout.com?
Video 2 : How to create questions on about2findout.com?
Video 3 : Hints on creating questions, and all question types
Video 4 : How to create a 7of9 quiz on about2findout.com?
Video 5 : How to add a contact?

I have also uploaded these videos on YouTube. For some reason, only 2 out of the 5 wmv files converted on YouTube. I redid the others as AVI files and that worked.

See all videos on http://www.youtube.com/decouteb

Labels: about2findout.com, camtasia, tutorials, video, youtube

It's not easy (for me at least) to design a web site that looks good and looks the same on all browsers. I test it out on IE and Firefox, and that's it. But you don't need to have a machine installed with 20 exotic browsers such as Flock or Epiphany or others. Go to browsershots.org and type in the URL of your site. You will be put in a queue and after some time (30 minutes for me) you'll get little screenshots of your site as seen by 44 different browsers.

About2findout.com renders pretty much the same on browsers, but on Konqueror and Flock 1.1 it doesn't show for some reason. Oh well.

Have a look:
http://browsershots.org/http://www.about2findout.com/

Labels: about2findout.com, browsers, browsershots.org

About2findout.com is not intended to run on mobile phones (at this point in time at least). And there is a site you can use to measure exactly how bad your web site runs on a mobile phone, or how much it would cost for someone to download it to their phones. It's scary. But you also get advise on how to make it work better on mobiles. The site is called ready.mobi, and please, don't go to about2findout.com on your mobile, unless it is an iPhone with full browser capability. On iPhones it works well, I've seen.

http://ready.mobi/results.jsp?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.about2findout.com&locale=en_EN

Labels: about2findout.com, mobile, ready.mobi

A somewhat longer than usual February has just passed, so it is time to have another look at what happened to the site last month.

I did not have much time in February to work on the site and that shows: only the challenge has been added from a functional point of view. But we did have a steady increase of visitors that subscribe and come back, usually to make the Friday Quizday quiz.

The 'natural' number of visits is currently around 30 per day. For 6 days I paid 5 euro a day for Google Advertisement and that got the site up to around 100 visitors per day. The Confusing Words Quiz was the most popular click-through.

One more important fact: after having Google ads (via Google Adsense) on my blog for over a year and on the site since December, I finally got a 76.30 euro payment from Google! I actually spend more on paying them ads for my site, but who's complaining, it's a good evolution. By the end of the year I hope advertisement will cover the hosting fees of the site.

Labels: about2findout.com

Last night the 600th question was added to the site. The recent 5-day Google Ads campaign also had a good effect: 100 visitors a day, and 13 new members. Tho most clicked add was the one for the 'Confusing Words' quiz, made by dailydog.
Here are the latest quiz and question 600 (in Dutch).

Labels: about2findout.com, cats, claus

You can challenge one of your contacts or anyone else on the site now. Here is how it works:

After you answer any question, click the link 'Challenge a friend' in the navigation box on the right.

A new screen opens, where you can select who to challenge. When you position the mouse over the 'send a challenge to' link, all your contacts are shown, and you can select one. You can also type in the user name of anyone on the site.

Next select for how many points (2-5) you bet that the other person won't know the question, type in an optional message, and hit the 'send' button. An e-mail and an internal message are sent out, and the challenged person has 7 days to accept or reject your challenge. If he or she answers the question right, you lose the points to him, otherwise you get the points from him.

Let the duels begin!

Labels: about2findout.com, challenges, new

I spent (wasted?) all day figuring out how to make people select and upload an avatar or profile picture to their account on the site. But here it is, from today onwards you will find a link in the edit profile page to upload an avatar. That should give a face to the people solving and creating questions and quizzes.

Asp.net (the programming language I use) only offers some file upload control, but I wanted something were users could crop the image their uploaded so the resulting avatar would always be 50 by 50 pixels. There is a great and expensive control available that does that (I-Load from Radactive) but I'm not going to spend 250$ on my free site. So I found a control named WebImageMaker. It was made by Tom Crane and does exactly what I wanted: upload an image, and select a part of it. I changed the control just a little bit so I could translate error messages and buttons in multiple languages.

The upload limit is 4 MB, and that is a default in asp.net. I did not see any reason to change that. Maybe one of these weeks you'll be able to upload images with questions, as I've figured out the basics.

Labels: about2findout.com, asp.net, avatars, new

I will start reviewing other quiz sites in this blog. I'll compare them to what I'm doing with about2findout.com, share my impression, get some inspiration, and each time donate and steal one question or quiz (bring on the lawsuits!).






I'm starting with the biggest of them all: funtrivia.com. By far, it is the largest and most popular trivia site and it dates back to the nineties. It has 1.900.000 members (!), and over 91.000 quizzes with in total 1.700.000 questions. Wow, that's big. At first impression: big and ugly site, but let's not jump ahead. Similar to about2findout.com the site is all about solving and submitting trivia questions and quizzes, and scoring points and get high in the rankings. But the underlying philosophy of the two sites is completely different.

Funtrivia is a typical web 1.0 site, where the design of about2findout.com goes for 2.0 elements where ever possible.. Funtrivia.com works with categories, not tags. It has forums. It works with a small group of editors who review submissions (and reject up to 2/3th) and control the quality of the site. And like all sites of that time, it suffers from severe ugliness and complexity. The complexity is probably a direct result its size and its development over time to keep people interested. It took me a while to figure out the difference between quizzes and games. Also the point system is scary at first sight. You easily get lost in the system. As for the look and feel, well, I'll try to give it a positive spin: vintage looks are hot. So this site would look great in a web museum. You know, the time sites had Times New Roman fonts. And oh my god, all that clip art. All that clip art! And what do all the icons mean? It's a good thing looks aren't everything. (I'm not saying that about2findout.com is beautiful and as simple as it can get, but at least over the last few months it has gotten better in both areas :).

The sign up procedure is easy and works with e-mail validation. But why are children under 13 not allowed? You get a few e-mails from them and can subscribe to a daily mailing list. (I also just launched one: the Friday Quizday mailing.) Once you are a member your points are kept, you can participate in the internal mailing system, etc. As a direct result of the size of funtrivia.com, you are compared within an assigned 'class', that is roughly the 5000 people who signed up at about the same time as you, so comparison makes sense. The language of the site is English.

You can search for quizzes in a certain category and questions are either multiple choice, fill in the blank or true/false. I find it strange that you have to type in 'TRUE' or 'FALSE' instead of selecting it, but it is probably good exercise for you finger muscles. You can get questions via HTML forms or via Flash. With the Flash player you get immediate feedback, with the HTML form you need to submit everything first. They also have daily and hourly quiz games that reset automatically. The global challenge is a nice initiative: it runs over a couple of months and is really for quiz die-hards. I haven't found any multi player games but maybe I didn't find them. As said: it's a complex site and patience is not a virtue I have. You can get points and badges. For example I have been on the site for two days now and made about 20 quizzes. Now I have a first level badge and this is my score and ranking:
"Your score of 1680 points ranks you as #286,574 of 777,506 ranking quiz players worldwide." Not bad after just 2 days. I conclude that a couple of 100.000 quiz players made an account once and never came back. But that is something I know as well.

The business model of funtrivia.com is in part advertisement, in part premium membership and in part selling quizzes. There is limited advertisement, it doesn't bother at all. The mainly rely on the gold membership they try to sell you for 20$ per 6 months. As a gold member you get extra things, such as access to special tournaments and advanced statistics but also some stuff that I find quite basic such as the ability to upload an avatar, visual indications of what quizzes you have already done or unlimited score tracking (for regular members only 300 quizzes are stored). I have no idea if they are as successful as Flickr in selling premium memberships. They also sell trivia questions for use in your own quiz evenings.
About2findout.com on the other hand is just starting up and changes almost every day. It is still searching for a way to get sustainable income to cover the hosting fees. The plan is to do it via the Google Adsense on the question page. So far I haven't seen a Google dollar yet, but we are hopeful.

Some other random things I like about the site: the notions of teams (for example I'm part of the Belgian quizzes group), the fact that they suggest similar quizzes based on the one you did, the whole concept of tournaments spread over days or weeks to make sure people keep playing and come back. Some things other than the complex and ugly nature I don't like: I can't upload a quiz yet. I was ready to donate the Christmas or HIV quiz, but you need to be a member over one month and have done 100 quizzes before you are even allowed to submit a quiz that will then be rejected or accepted by the editors. I guess I'll have to keep going back to funtrivia for a month and keep you informed of the authoring capabilities in one month from now...

In summary: funtrivia.com is the biggest of its kind, and that is mainly due to its size (many people, many questions) which attracts newcomers and due to the quality of its questions database. But it is big and ugly and complex and partly free, partly paying. Above all, it is a typical web 1.0 site.
In comparison to about2findout.com, I must say they had to deal with a lot of things I don't need to because I have a limited amount of players and questions. The philosophy of the sites are different: I rely on the 'wisdom of the crowds' to guard the quality of the trivia, not on editors and all kinds of rules. But funtrivia does have something that I should introduce one of these months: a purpose. You can play tournaments etc, in about2findout.com you can only do a question and a quiz. It will improve once I get around programming the challenge, where you can bet points with your friends, but still, I need some reasons for people to come back to the site more often.

Labels: about2findout.com, funtrivia.com, quiz, trivia