donderdag, juni 26, 2008

 

Big Trivia Tournament in July

Announcing : the first trivia tournament on about2findout.com!

In July, the first Big Trivia Tournament will go live. This is what you can expect:
- There will be 25 brand new quizzes posted during the entire month. That is almost one per day.
- Only logged in users can participate (if needed you can create a free account)
- You have the entire month to solve the quizzes, so you can do it when best fits you. Do one every day, do them all at the end, or before or after you take a holiday.
- Your tournament score is the sum of all points on all the questions in the tournament. You will still get your regular points too and those include the double points for getting 7 or more on a quiz. For the tournament, it's just the sum of your points on the questions you had right.

So, just a little more patience, and the game begins...

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donderdag, mei 01, 2008

 

Choice out of 3 random questions

Similar to the about2findout.mobi site, I changed the main web site to also give you the choice of 3 different random questions when you are not following a quiz.

Check it out here.

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donderdag, maart 06, 2008

 

Challenge updated

I've updated the challenges. Now you can challenge a contact directly, or just go to the 'challenge contact' page in the Club Zone, and select from one of three random questions to challenge with.

The Club Zone main page also has an overview of open challenges and challenges won and lost.

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zondag, februari 03, 2008

 

about2findout.com second month results

The site was launched in December last year, and I've already reported you on the first month. Here is what happened in January:

In January, some new features such as RSS feeds, 3 new question types and the Friday QuizDay newsletter were introduced. But what is different from last month is that there were no Google or other advertisements to drive traffic to the site. I wanted to test the 'residual' visits after promoting it one month, and just rely on the blog, visitors own promotion and Friday Quizday flash. It was not bad. Statistics come from the free Google Analytics service.

- The site had a total of 1392 unique visits (down from 1512), 65% of them new visits and good for a total page view of 9282.

- There is a lot of variation in visitors per day. The high peaks are not there anymore because there were no Google ads this month. The average is around 45 daily visitors, with peaks of 80 or more. In the weekends there is a drop in visitors. The Friday Quizday flash has effects on Friday and Monday.

- Visitors stay on average 4 minutes, but there is a 58% bounce rate (only visit 1 page)

- Browsers: IE is still the most used browser with 66%, but that is a 7% drop by last month.

- 61% of people find us via Google.

- There were 19 new members, some of them got really active on the site. This month we also had the first quiz in German.

- The numbers of questions and quizzes increased significantly. We went from 225 to 522 published questions!

- The top 5 of visiting countries: Unites States, Belgium, United Kingdom, India, Netherlands.

- The Hall of Fame after two months:

NameAccuracyPointsMember sinceCountry
QuizMan 53%98816 Sep 2007BE
Dailydog 85%87223 Sep 2007BE
bert_decoutere 62%75909 Sep 2007BE
Stijn 73%54202 Sep 2007BE
elgotes 69%38516 Dec 2007AR
Kareltjeslimmerik 58%21013 Dec 2007BE
Popol 78%19418 Sep 2007BE
belandje 67%13727 Jan 2008BE
shubhox 69%10820 Dec 2007IN
monnu1380 73%8521 Dec 2007IN

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zondag, januari 27, 2008

 

New: achievements added to profile

There is a new section called 'My.Achievements' in the profile section that lists the quizzes you scored 7 or more on (and thus passed, they are called 7of9 quiz remember?). The list is in chronological order, starting with the latest quiz you passed.

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donderdag, januari 24, 2008

 

New: question and quiz analytics

I've added Question analytics and Quiz analytics pages to the site tonight.

When you are done with a question or a quiz, you will find a link to the analytics in the navigation box on the right. That's where you will see all kinds of properties of the item, but that's also the place where you can see the scores of other people. For privacy reasons, you can only see the scores of people who added you as a contact.

So for example, if a teacher asks his or her students to add him (or her again) as a contact, the teacher can see their scores. It is a first step towards reporting, but should cover the immediate needs. Oh, and the reports and difficulty levels are not reliable if not at least 10 people participated.

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maandag, januari 14, 2008

 

New question type: open question

The most challenging new question type that is available since today on about2findout.com is the open answer type. It just provides a textbox where you can type in the answer.

Try it here:
QKEJ82

I did not want a stupid question type where the answer is compared to the exact string that the author provides. That leads to a lot of frustration if you don't type in exactly what the author has in mind. What if you forget a capital? What if you type in a space too much by mistake? What if there are multiple correct answers or ways to answer?

So this is how it works:

- The author types in the question and hint (optional), and indicates the expected answer. That can be free text, or one word, a number, a name (= 2 words) or a year (= 4 digits). The question taker will only be able to type in appropriate characters in the box, and see a little watermark telling what we are looking for. In my question example I'm looking for the name of a city, which is one word. So you cannot type in spaces or weird characters like @ and % in the answer box.
The default is free text without exotic characters.

- The author can also indicate if the answer should be evaluated case sensitive or not. In my example, I didn't require it, although the names of cities should be spelled with a capital. But beijing and Beijing are both fine. The default is case insensitive.

- The author can provide a list of correct answers. In my example, I accept both Beijing and Peking (the older name) as correct answers. When the answer is a name for example you could accept just the last name, the first and last name or the last and first name.

- The question taker's answer is preprocessed: trailing spaces are removed, and the spaces between words are one maximum, so extra spaces that one types in by mistake are ignored.

- Then I'm looking for the closest match with one of the correct answers. If I find a 100% match the answer is correct. If I find a match below 50% the answer is false. If the highest match is between 50% and 100% the question taker can try again, and gets a hint with the characters that were right. That way they can correct for little spelling mistakes.

I'm sure the algorithm can be improved to have a more accurate scoring, but for now it should work fine for both authors and quiz takers.

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New question type: put in the right order

You can now also make sorting questions on about2findout.com. As an author, you can specify up to 6 items that need to be ordered. It might be a chronological order, or steps in a process, etc. As a question taker, you see the items in random order and can use up and down arrows to put them in the correct order.

Do the sample below to order the Olympic cities of the past 6 Olympiads:

W23U3B
http://www.about2findout.com/quickcode.aspx?code=W23U3B

At first, I wanted to use the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit's Reorder control. But I couldn't find any tutorials on how to use it, and it seems to only work while databounded to a data source. So instead of a nice drag and drop component the arrows will have to do for now.

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New question type: true or false

The past weekend I programmed 3 new question types on the site. The first one was the easiest one: a true/false question type. I actually hesitated long time before making it, because it is not really a new type. It is just a very particular multiple choice questions with two predefined options. So it was easy to implement, and I reused a lot of the existing multiple choice question type.

The benefit for authors is that you don't have to type in the words 'true' or 'false' anymore, you just select the right one. That should save about 10 seconds :-). As a little extra for question takers, the default true or false text will be completed with a random message to make it a little more spicy. For example: 'False' might become 'False - Liar, liar, pants on fire.'

To sample a brand new true/false question, take the one below:

http://www.about2findout.com/quickcode.aspx?code=BN2G54
BN2G54

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dinsdag, januari 01, 2008

 

Finally feeds

I finally got around to create RSS feeds for about2findout.com. Now you can subscribe to new quizzes in English, new quizzes in Dutch and new questions by a certain member.


What are RSS feeds?
A key characteristic of modern 2.0 web sites is that you don't have to visit them every single time to check for new items. The content comes to you via something called RSS feeds. You can subscribe to news items, or get notified when a blogger posts a new article, or when a Flickr member posts a new photo, etc. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is basically a little file on a web site that lists the latest additions. So the web site has to have this RSS service. You, the user, need to have a little program to see and manage all your subscriptions. Some e-mail clients like Thunderbird have an RSS reader. Browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer have build-in capabilities for subscribing to RSS feeds these days. I'm using a free service from Google, called Google Reader to read all the stuff I'm subscribed to. Bloglines is another popular web-based RSS reader.

How to subscribe?
If a site has subscriptions, you will see it via the orange RSS icon. In modern browsers, you will be able to directly subscribe to them by clicking the icon and adding them to your RSS reader. Otherwise you can always copy/paste the URL of the feed manually in your reader.

Firefox shows the RSS button on the right end of the address bar, if a feed is available.



Internet Explorer 7 shows the RSS button next to the home button, but it is only enabled when one or more feeds are available.








RSS feeds in about2findout.com
On the home page and on the main page of the Quiz Zone, there is an automatic feed for new quizzes in English that your browser will detect. On the profile page of a member, there is an automatic feed available and a link to subscribe to all new questions of that member. The feed shows the last 10 additions and has a link to the question or quiz. A central page with direct links to all feeds that are available is here:

http://www.about2findout.com/feeds.aspx

How did I do it?
I used the ASP.NET RSS 2.0 Toolkit to create the feeds. It is a free asp.net component, available on Codeplex. You can find a nice tutorial on ScottGu's blog and on Piyush Shah's blog. What I did in essence was:
1- download the toolkit and sample site from Codeplex
2- add the components to Visual Studio (right click on the toolbar and choose 'select items' and point to the RSS toolkit dll file.
3- create an .ashx handler file, based on the sample in the toolkit that checks the request parameters of the page and creates the feed items based on that
3- add an RssHyperLink component to every page you want to have an automatic feed detection and point it to the .ashx file.
It took me a couple of hours playing with the sample site to figure out how it works, but the components are very good and you get a feed in no time published. I can recommend this toolkit to anyone wanting to publish RSS or atom feeds in an asp.net application.

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zaterdag, december 29, 2007

 

New: What's New page. See all new persons, questions and quizzes from the last x days.

Today I launched another new item on about2findout.com : the What's New? page. You can find the page via the navigation box in the Quiz Zone, or via a new link in the top right corner of the main screen.

It shows you what has happened in the last 1, 7 or 30 days.

- Top scorer and top country of that period (for this week it is elgoto with 60 points and Belgium with 95 points).

- New quizzes

- New persons who joined

- New questions

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vrijdag, december 28, 2007

 

AddThis bookmark button added

I 'stumbled upon' a new bookmarking site, called AddThis.com. It allows you to submit a page you like to many social bookmarking sites at once (like Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, etc). So I changed the bookmarking buttons on the question and quiz pages (actually, I moved them to the 'share this' popup) and replaced them by the AddThis.com button. The button with a pull-down menu doesn't work together with the AJAX JavaScript, so I had to add the static one.

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Automatic adjustment of difficulty (by Otto)

I've implemented an automatic adjustment of the difficulty level of questions. As you know, the difficulty level is indicated by 1, 2 or 3 gray dots, and depending on the level you can win or loose 1, 2 or 3 points when you solve the questions. The level is set by the author in the Author Zone (properties tab).

But once a question has at least 10 views, the level gets updated automatically once a day by Otto, the new automatic agent of the site. The rules are:
- If more than 66% of people know the answer, the level is 1 (easy)
- If between 33% and 66% of people know the answer, the level is 2 (moderate)
- If less than 33% of people know the answer, the level is 3 (difficult)

Otto (the automatic agent of the site) is implemented in ASP.NET. I looked hard to find an asp.net task scheduler, but couldn't find one. Many implementations use a console application that calls a web service, or use the Windows Task Scheduler. I don't have access to either on my hosted environment at seekdotnet.com. If you do control your own server, those solutions might work for you:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ASPNETService.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vb/WebJobScheduler.aspx

I don't need fancy schedulers that run if the application is down or idle, so I just added some code in the global.asax file in the Session_End section. That way every time a session is ended, the code runs and checks the database if a job should run. It works.

While I was at it, I also made Otto send messages when your questions reach 10 or 100 views, or when someone adds you as a contact. Otto only speaks English, and I hope that is not a problem.

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When do you get points? (adjusted)

I fixed a few bugs in the points system. You can no longer get points for your own questions. And when you publish a new question or quiz, you get 3 points (previously 5), but you get one extra point if the question has feedback, and one more extra point if your question contains more information in the form of links or text. (So that is still 5 in the end.) Here are the new rules:

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donderdag, december 27, 2007

 

Did I do that question already?

I've implemented a long awaited feature on the site: you can now see what questions you already did.

On the question and quiz tables in the Quiz Zone and Club Zone you now have icons to indicate if you have done a question before. If you hover over the icon, you even get the question QuickCode and the last date you took it. On the image you see the latest questions from my contact Diego (elgotes) on Spielberg. They are difficult :-).

Means you did the question or quiz successfully in the last month. You can do it again, but you can't get any more points during this period.

Means you did the question or quiz unsuccessfully in the last month. You can do it again, but you can't get any more points during this period.

Means you did the question or quiz successfully but more than a month ago. You can do it again this time and see if you still remember. But beware! If you are wrong points go off.

Means you did the question or quiz unsuccessfully but more than a month ago. Now is the time to prove you have learned something and do it again. But beware! If you are wrong again points go off.

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woensdag, december 26, 2007

 

New: Search for people in your country

I've updated the search page. Now you can search for people in the same country.
- Go to the search page via Quiz Zone --> Search
- Click on the tab 'Search for people'
- Select the country in the drop-down box (it should be populated with your own country)
- Press OK

Other improvements on the search page include a link to the questions created by the persons you search. Under the navigation box you can also see how many questions are in the database and how many of them you have solved. If you click on any of the search result questions, you can just click the Next Question button to go to the next question in your search list, no need to go back to the search page. And searching for people will now get you a direct link to their questions. Did you also know that you can click on the underlined headers in the table to sort it? Click once for sorting ascending, twice for sorting descending.

I was surprised to see 17 members from India, out of the 57. Welcome guys and girls!

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about2findout.com first month results

The site launched a month ago with the AIDS Day Quiz. As I used Google AdWords to promote that quiz, there were about 80-90 visitors a day. Later it dropped back to 20 per day and went up again around the time the Christmas Quiz was launched. That one was promoted again via AdWords, and linked in my Christmas wishes to everyone. Biggest hit was on December 21 with 145 hits. Yesterday on Christmas I had 70. Here are some statistics from the first month of the site, provided by the free service Google Analytics:

- I had 1512 unique visitors (83.10% new visits) that viewed 12745 pages.
- That is an average page view of 7.06.
- People stay on average 4 minutes 36 seconds on the site.
- 47.37% only visit one page.
- Browsers: 73.91% use Internet Explorer, 22.99% use Firefox.
- I had visits from 106 countries. The top 5 country list is: USA, India, UK, Belgium, Canada.
- 32.24% is referred via Google, 23.38% via advertisement
- I spent 62.71 euro on Google AdWords advertising, and got 710 clicks for it. My add showed 410.392 times.
- There are now 225 published questions in the database
- There are now 59 registered members
- The Hall Of Fame after one month:

Name Accuracy Points Member since Country
QuizMan 42% 535 16 Sep 2007 BE
bert_decoutere 82% 497 09 Sep 2007 BE
elgotes 65% 207 16 Dec 2007 AR
Dailydog 87% 192 23 Sep 2007 BE
Stijn 85% 132 02 Sep 2007 BE
monnu1380 73% 85 21 Dec 2007 IN
Popol 79% 84 18 Sep 2007 BE
Kareltjeslimmerik 60% 62 13 Dec 2007 BE
fakulaga 67% 39 21 Dec 2007 IN
Ber_wiels 75% 37 19 Dec 2007 BE

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zondag, december 23, 2007

 

200 questions

Tonight question number 200 was posted on the site. (Actually, there are now 204 published questions in the database.) Nr 200 is part of the 'Belgium Quiz' by Stijn. Thanks Stijn!

QuickCode: DYAZ5
URL: http://www.about2findout.com/quickcode.aspx?code=DYAZ5

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dinsdag, december 18, 2007

 

New Wordpress blog : Quizman's Quiz Qlog (QQQ)

Today I started a new blog, this time not at Blogger, but at Wordpress. I'm happy with Blogger, don't get me wrong, but I want to experience the difference. And above all, for the new blog I want to be able to postdate articles so they automatically get published on a future date.

So far I find the service very similar, with a little more ease of use for Blogger. Time will tell which one I like more.

The purpose of the new blog called 'Quizman's Quiz Qlog (QQQ)' is to promote one new quiz per week. It's one of the initiatives I'm taking to make the site more well known. After building the basics in 2007, the focus for 2008 is going to be on growing it and getting people to visit, use and like the site. (And I'll keep improving it naturally.) Today I got the nicest compliment from Diego, a friend from Argentina who visited my site: "Its not just for fun, its like a drug!!!! hahahaha. Excellent site! and im learning a lot too!!Hugs back ". And that's indeed what's it all about. (The learning and fun, not the drugs thing.)

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zaterdag, december 15, 2007

 

Christmas Quiz (what do you know about Christmas and Santa?)

Ho, ho, ho!
The Christmas Quiz has gone live. It has 9 questions on Christmas, the history of Christmas and Santa Claus. So, what do you know about it? Only one way to find out...

QuickCode: DGZMU
Link: http://www.about2findout.com/quickcode.aspx?code=DGZMU

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New: Question Cards

Another new feature added today on the Quiz site about2findout.com is the Question Card or Quiz Card. When you publish a question or quiz, a card image is automatically generated with the first lines of the question on it. Clicking on the card will directly get you to the question or quiz. Via the promote link in the Author Zone, you can get the HTML code to add such a card to your website or blog. The cards are also used internally to offer random questions to visitors.

GYK2BV

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Improvements in question and quiz screens

There have been updates to the question and quiz screens.

- The 'more information' and 'share' links are now moved to the navigation box on the right.
- The share link shows the QuickCode as well as the direct URL to the question or quiz
- Quizzes also get scored for anonymous users now.
- The tags are always visible and moved to the central part, under the question information.
- The quiz page only shows the green score box, not the red one and the question backgrounds
have been updated.

- There is a new part that shows the last three people who succesfully made the question or the last three people who scored 7 or more on the quiz.
- The links to post the question or quiz to Blink, Digg, Furl, Google, Magnolia, NewsVine, Reddit, Spurl, Technorati and Delicious now work.
- Three random other questions or quizzes are suggested in the right bar.

Another small improvement is on the search page, that now also searches quizzes. But best of all, when you click on one of the questions on the search page, you can navigate to the next on the list without having to search again. And on popular demand you now get an indication if you have already answered a question recently. Recently means in the last 30 days.

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New: Share quizzes and questions via QuickCode

There are a bunch of new features available today on about2findout.com. The first one I'd like to introduce is the QuickCode.

Every question and quiz has a unique code with numbers and letters. A question has a 6-digit quickcode, and a quiz has a 5-digit unique code. You can find the codes back in various places on the site, for example under every question. You can also find it back in the promotion page of your own questions. (Go to Author Zone, and click on the link Promote next to one of your questions.)

The home page now has a new box in the upper left corner where visitors can directly type in the QuickCode and go to the quiz or question at hand. That means you can share your quizzes and questions by just giving other people the QuickCode and the site name.

Try it: the QuickCode for the Aids World Day Quiz for example is AMH7E .

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zondag, november 25, 2007

 

Promoting the site: experiment with Google AdWords

Now that a beta version of my site has just gone live, it is time to promote it! So I've decided to try out the world's most famous Internet advertisement company: Google. Google has a paying service (that generates about all of its income by the way) called AdWords. It allows you to create the familiar ad campaigns you see on the Google search pages. The principle is simple: you create your ad and link it with a list of keywords. Then you say how much you are willing to pay per click (I chose 0.09 euro cent because the estimator didn't give any results below that) and a maximum amount you want to spend a day (I chose 5 euro). An auction mechanism then determines what users will see your add based on the search terms they entered and other advertisers that bid for the same words.

The setup of the account was easy. You get the choice between a starter and a standard account type. The differences are listed here. I had to go for a standard account because otherwise I could only target one country. There is a lot of help assisting you choosing the right keywords and settings. But you should very carefully check the review page just before you sign up! All of the sudden Google had changed my maximum rates to 500 euro a day and 9 euro per click. I suppose a calculation error with the comma, but not funny if it is your money. So I went back and changed it. I also linked my AdWords account with my Google Analytics account.

I obviously don't want to go broke on AdWords because I'm running a completely free site here, but I want to see its effect and play around with it. The campaign I'm running right now is about the World Aids Day Quiz. I'll let it run for 1-2 weeks and let you know its impact in a follow-on post.

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New: 7of9 quiz added

I added a quiz type to about2findout.com. It is called the 7of9 quiz, and the concept is simple. The quiz has 9 questions. As before, every question will get you 1, 2 or 3 points according to its difficulty level. After you've done all questions and if you answered at least 7 or more questions correct, you will get double points for the quiz.

The Author Zone now has a new button to create the quiz. First you edit the quiz by just adding the IDs of 9 questions. They don't have to be your own questions even, you can add any question. Next you can preview, publish or promote your quiz, just as you can for individual questions.
Please let me know if you like this new feature and how it can be improved or made easier.

The site has just gone live with its first quiz, the Aids Day 2007 Quiz. World Aids Day is traditionally held on Dec 1st, which is also my target date for the going live. Try it on:
http://www.about2findout.com/quickcode.aspx?code=AMH7E .

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World Aids Day Quiz 2007

AIDS has been around for more than 25 year now. Despite the fact it has killed more than 25 million people since 1981, AIDS is still unspoken and unknown in many countries. What do you know about HIV and AIDS? Take the 7of 9 quiz and share it with your friends!

http://www.about2findout.com/quickcode.aspx?code=AMH7E

This quiz is also the opening quiz on the brand new about2findout.com quiz 2.0 site, a site dedicated to questions, answers and quizzes. Hint: create an account if you want to keep scores.

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zaterdag, november 24, 2007

 

The silence is over... be warned :-)

I just realized I haven't posted an article in just under a month. First I was on holiday in Florida, then work got in the way and the last week I've been very, very busy preparing the go live of about2findout.com on Dec 1st. So it was just silence before the storm really :-). In fact I just uploaded both the brand new about2findout.com quiz 2.0 site to the root of the domain, and moved the experimental about3findout.com site to another server. So if you made links or bookmarks before, you will need to update them. The blog hasn't moved.

Tomorrow I'll be leaving for Berlin, where I'll attend the annual Online Educa Berlin conference on e-learning. It will be the fourth time I'm going and I'm looking forward to it as usual. The conference is a unique place with a mixed crowd of business and academics, and it is the time of year I go to contemplate on the work I've done so far, and what I want to do the next year. I'll be giving a session on the IBM Knowledge Factory and social software, and chairing another on learning in the enterprise.

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woensdag, oktober 17, 2007

 

Quiz - what do you know about Florida?

This Saturday I'm leaving for Orlando, Florida and I'm not coming back for 2 weeks. So I took the opportunity to create a little quiz with 9 questions on Florida. Hope you enjoy.

http://www.about2findout.com/quickcode.aspx?code=VKPLF

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zaterdag, oktober 06, 2007

 

How to make a web 2.0 user interface design

The development site about3findout.com is 6 weeks old, and already got its third major user interface redesign. This time I tried to apply the most common principles of web 2.0 interfaces. Hope you like it and find it easier and more intuitive to navigate. It's still not done completely, but hey, it's 2.0 so perpetual beta :-) .

In this article I want to point you to the various places on the Internet that helped me to reshape the site.

First of all I redefined the color schemes for the site. I still have four separate color coded zones Quiz zone, Author zone, Club zone and Help zone. But the very bright and painful pink and green colors have been replaced. I went from a 3-color scheme to a 2-color scheme. For every zone there is one color 'letter' for the characters, and one softer color 'lightshade' for the background. There are a lot of color sites out there on the mighty Internet, and these were most helpful to me:
The next site that helped me a lot was the 'Web 2.0 How-do-design Guide' on webdesignfromscratch.com. It inspired me into applying the following design principles:

And luckily these days you don't need to be a graphical artist yourself to create nice logo's, boxes, gradients, backgrounds or tabs. All that is available for free on the net. Here is what I used and recommend:

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donderdag, oktober 04, 2007

 

New que