Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

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.

Labels: about2findout, new

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

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.

Labels: about2findout, new

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.

Labels: about2findout, new

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:


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.

Labels: about2findout, new, open_answer

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:


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.

Labels: about2findout, new, reorder

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

Labels: about2findout, new, true/false

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 just send out the second Friday Quizday flash to all registered members of the about2findout.com site. The idea is to promote one particular quiz per week, and declare Friday the day to play it. It is one of the initiatives to get a community started that regularly come and play a few quizzes. This week's quiz by the way is on the Internet.


The good thing is that the mail is not considered spam (it is not intended as spam either). You can select to get the mail or not via a preference in your profile.
Last week, the response to the first flash was rather low, but I've adapted the layout of the flash since so it is (hopefully) more clear. I chose a HTML-based mail. So far, no complaints yet.

You can see the newsletter at http://www.about2findout.com/helpinghand/article.aspx?article=QUIZDAY.
If you like to receive it, just indicate so, and select the appropriate preference in your profile. The Friday Quizday flash is currently only in English.

Labels: new

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.

Labels: about2findout, asp.net rss toolkit, feeds, new, RSS, subscription

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

Labels: about2findout, new

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.

Labels: about2findout, asp.net, new, otto

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:

• 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. The difficulty of a question is determined by how many people have it right.
  • 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 30 days wherein you cannot get scored for the same question again. You can see if you've done a question lately by the green or red squares in the overview tables.
  • You cannot get points for your own questions.
• You get double points when you have 7 or more on a quiz.
  • When you score 7 or more on a 7of9 quiz, the points you scored on that quiz are doubled. You only get the extra points when you have made all 9 questions.
• You get points when you publish a question or quiz.
  • You get 3 points when you publish a new question or a new quiz.
  • You get an extra point if you provide feedback with your question.
  • You get an extra point if you provide more information (either via text or via links) to your question or quiz.
  • You do not get any additional points when you republish a question.
• You can loose all your points when you are violating the code of conduct.

Labels: about2findout, new, points

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.

Labels: about2findout, help, new

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!

Labels: about2findout, new, search page

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.

Labels: about2findout, new, promote, Question Card

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.

Labels: about2findout, design, new

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 .

Labels: about2findout, new, quickcode