Yesterday we finished a long-needed upgrade of our Quizlet servers. If you’ve ever been studying on Thursday night, you might know that Quizlet slows down when there are a lot of people studying for their Friday exams. We’ve upgraded from having 2 servers to 3, and all of them are better-tuned and have better hardware specs. It doesn’t sound that exciting, but let me tell you I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, and you should experience a much-needed upgrade in the general swiftness of the site.

I haven’t updated in awhile, but I have been working on Quizlet quite a bit. You might have noticed the new home page for logged-out users, the new subjects pages, and a few features pages. There are a bunch of new features I’m working on, some involving some interesting math, so I can’t wait to put them up when they’re ready.

Last time I posted, I was about to leave for MIT. I’m here now! Cambridge, MA is a great place to be. I’m absolutely loving this place–the people, the excitement for learning, the quirkiness, the sheer genius of the people walking around. I get to paint and do whatever I want to my room (including my door). It’s all awesome. Photos are in order, eh?

The other day we had a fire in our kitchen (not our fault! broken oven!) and since we have a webcam in our kitchen, we could watch the firefighters putting it out from outside in the rain (everyone had to evacuate the building).

(Photo by Mario Bollini)

At the beginning of the year, the people in my dorm built a 109-foot wooden rollercoaster in the courtyard. It was excellent.

Last weekend we took a bus to an apple orchard and had tons of fun picking apples and buying apple cider and taking fun pictures.

One other note: The iPhone project has been put on hold temporarily, but I think it’ll be starting up again in the next couple weeks. A lot of you have been talking about it, so we’re really excited to get more work done on it.

The learn mode, now more awesome.

Hey,

Today, I’m launching the new learn mode! Finally, right? It’s been in the works forever. Learn mode was the “original” Quizlet feature - it’s been the same since we started. Now it gets a much-needed makeover. It may not be quite perfect yet, but it’s a lot better than the old one.

While I was launching the new code, I just happened to look over at number of accounts on Quizlet, and it just happened to PASS 200,000 PEOPLE TODAY. Wooo!! Thanks everyone.

Here’s your feature list:

• New learn mode. Since the beta launch, I added a discrete “override: I was right” link, and a few bugfixes.
• Customizable symbols and accents on every page
• Fixed the grading on the Test page when your symbols were turned on.
• Updated search to be more accurate and do a better job of counting results, and be much faster.
• Renamed “tags” to “subjects” - same feature, just easier to understand.
• Massive speed improvements - reducing the weight of every page, and also doing some caching that should make everything a bit faster everywhere and make the servers a little happier handling more people. (As of right now, some of the data is still being imported, so don’t worry about funny word counts and missing usernames)
• You can now use Learn mode without being logged in (it just won’t save your place if you navigate away)

Quizlet works on an iPhone now, but it could be more awesome…

Lastly, we’re going to start work on a Quizlet iPhone application very soon. I’d like to hear your ideas on what it should do, what it should look like, and what killer things you’d like to see on it that you wouldn’t be possible on the web. Write a comment!

Hey all! I’m back from my two-week trip to France! I spent about a week in Paris, and another week traveling the country and visiting my French teacher at her house in France. Here are some pictures:

Me pretending to drive a tank on Bastille Day

Fireworks at the Eiffel Tower on Bastille Day

The pre-race caravan of the Tour de France (yes I saw it!) had some funny cars

Just back from swimming in the Mediterranean

It was a great trip…But now I’m back and I’ve just about finished up what I promised y’all before I left.

I’m going to try a new thing: I’ve launched a secondary site for adventurous Quizlet users at beta.quizlet.com … It has all the latest Quizlet features, but it may have a few bugs here and there too. It uses the same database as regular quizlet.com, so what you do there will sync up with the regular site.

So what’s on beta.quizlet.com now?

• A better Learn mode: completely rewritten from the ground up, it shares most of the same interface as the old one. It’s much much faster (no more having to wait while the next item loads), and it has better visuals on the status of your studying. Also, if you give up or type nothing in to the box (or press escape!), it will have you copy the answer before moving on.
• Better customizable accents and symbols: There’s a new interface for customizing your accents, which allows you to change them in-page. A lot of people didn’t know you could change your symbols box - now it’s more obvious.
• Streamlined downloads: I’ve spent a good while refining the HTTP requests and download size of the entire site. The total page weight of each page is down approximately 20-40%, and the number of HTTP requests is down about 30%. This should make the site faster for users on shaky or slow connections.
• The usual micro-improvements here and there

Try it all out at beta.quizlet.com

Your feedback on all of this new stuff is essential, so please tell us how you like it in the comments of this post, or via the top-right Feedback button. Thanks! Lastly, I’m hoping to put all of this new stuff on the main site in a few days.

Hope y’all are enjoying your summers!
-Andrew

Hello summer friends! Just wanted to keep you up on some of the latest news about Quizlet.

Fun news: The Mike and Juliet show had a rerun yesterday, so there was a nice boost in traffic on the site. Here’s my blog post about that experience.

So…

On Friday, I’m going on a two week vacation to France with a friend from my Americorps crew last summer. I’m not taking my laptop, so it will be a great (and much-needed) getaway from the keyboard. And France will be beautiful. I can’t wait.

But what have I been doing with Quizlet? I’ve been making a lot of changes under the hood. A new revision is almost ready to go live, but I can’t let myself go away for two weeks while y’all suffer with any bugs I introduce. So they’ll have to wait until (soon) after my return. Most of the coding is done, but the making-sure-the-site-still-works part isn’t 100% done.

One of my major projects has been reducing the number of HTTP requests and the weight of pages. In my current copy of Quizlet, each page sees about 10 less HTTP requests and about 30-40 KB less downloading. All this is accomplished without changing a bit of functionality. This should especially help those in networks far away from Quizlet’s California servers (yes, multiple!) and those with spotty or slow internet connections (my high school had a bad one).

My other project has been to finally tackle Learn mode. It’s the premier feature of Quizlet, which means that while it’s still innovative in my opinion, the code behind it is a small mess. I’ve decided to scrap the very cool but ultimately less functional learn mode I dreamed up all the way back in January. Instead, the new learn mode will be very similar to the current one, but a whole ton faster and with a better design for keeping track of your progress. And once that project is taken care of, I’ll be free to tackle some more exciting and innovative ideas that have been somewhat restricted by Learn mode 1.0’s inefficiencies.

So yeah…nothing to announce for you guys today, just promises for the future. Hope you’re all having a wonderful summer.

-Andrew

My longtime friend (and occasional Quizlet user) Jackie and me, at graduation

On Friday the 13^th, I graduated from Albany High School. I know, what a lucky day to graduate, eh? It was a wonderful ceremony, and it feels great to finally be done with mandatory education. Now I have the summer to relax, work on Quizlet, and go on vacation. I still don’t have it all planned out yet, but I probably won’t be going on any massive adventures like last summer. And then in last August, I’ll be shipping off for MIT to start my first classes of college!

I haven’t posted on the blog for awhile, but that’s not for lack of things happening at Quizlet. Quite the contrary actually. Here’s the first big thing:

I’m announcing for the first time, right now, that Quizlet has taken a small investment from angel investors. We’ve spent the last few months working out a deal, and I’m happy to say everything has finally gone through and we’re ready to work together and make Quizlet even greater. Their input will help Quizlet grow to even more users and spur the development of even more useful features on the site.

One of our first tasks was to hire a dedicated support person. She’ll be coming on in about a week, and I’m sure she’ll introduce herself soon. One reason I’ve decided to take this investment is so that I can focus on programming and high-level business stuff. I also expect to be very busy at MIT, so I want to be able to maximize my Quizlet time toward improving the site. That’s not to say I’ll be out of touch with regular Quizlet users - I’ll still be on the site every day - but I’m going to be delegating more of the support tasks to our new head of support.

And because it’s just so hard to write a blog post without announcing some new features, I’ve cooked up some new things for ya’ll:

• A sharing box on the set page. This box makes it easier for you to get your friends signed on and using Quizlet collaboratively.
• Inline editing of the terms and definitions from right on the set page. You just double-click on a term, and it turns into an input box instantly. Hit return or click anywhere outside the input box and your edit will be saved.
• Fixed a long-standing bug that made curly punctuation characters imported from Microsoft Word break when studying. Sets made from now on will not have this problem, but sets made previously will still have it. If you simply click Edit and then Save (without changing anything) on a set with this problem, it will fix itself.
• Speed and memory usage improvements across the board.

And as always, there’s more in the pipeline that I can’t quite share with you. I hope you all are enjoying the summer!

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve had very sporadic reports that Quizlet was completely failing on some computers. This afternoon I spent an hour on the phone working with a very helpful Quizlet user who was able to help me find the problem.

As I understand it, Quizlet was causing some older computers to freeze as soon as they tried to load the page. They were using Internet Explorer, but I’m not sure what version (this user was using it on Windows ME). This was happening since I introduced Space Race and along with it the shiny new expandable buttons. It was not happening on IE 7, and not the majority of IE 6. But it was causing problems for enough computers to be very annoying!

I started by disabling some of the compression features on Quizlet, but they still crashed the computer. Next I transfered the HTML onto a separate test server and had him reload the page and tell me whether the computer crashed or not. I narrowed it down to an external file, then to the main css file (with 1,800+ lines), then to the bottom half of it, then down to a single rule block, then finally to a single CSS rule: white-space: nowrap. Why that single rule would cause a problem in Internet Explorer is anyone’s guess, but it does cause it to crash, and removing it made the site work fine again. This problem has been documented, but it’s so obscure that most developers probably don’t know about it. This is the kind of bug that’s impossible to predict.

So long story short: Welcome back Internet Explorer users! I’m very sorry you couldn’t use the site for the last couple weeks.

Last quick message: this is just one more reason to switch to Firefox, which very rarely has problems like this and should always work with Quizlet (and every other site). Its completely capable of replacing Internet Explorer, and I personally recommend it all the time. You’ll like it!