Okay so I’ve been crazy busy lately, and I’ve finally got a moment to post about what’s been happening. On Tuesday, April 15 I was interviewed about Quizlet on the “Morning Show with Mike and Juliet” — it’s a nationally syndicated morning show on FOX. It was short, but I really enjoyed it and meeting everyone there was super fun.

So here’s the story: That week I was visiting MIT’s campus preview weekend (1000% awesome) and I got a call from the producers of the show and they invited me to come to New York City for it. So I took a couple days off from school and took the short trip from Boston to New York City. They paid for the flight, a nice hotel, and chauffeur service all around. Just to keep the record clear, I am NOT a millionaire :o)

All during the day preceding the show I was making lots of phone calls and doing programming to prepare for a day of mega-traffic. I also got in a decent amount of time to check out the sights of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Fox sent us a car to pick us up at the hotel, even though the studio was just one block away from the hotel. It actually took much longer for them to drive us than it would have taken to walk, because of all the one-way streets and the crazy New York traffic.

When we got to the studio, I got to lounge around with the other guests of the morning for awhile, then the producers prepped me on questions. They didn’t prep me on the last one though - that was a complete surprise, and for half a second I panicked before I remembered that a cow = une vache (yay Quizlet!). I briefly did makeup (just a little foundation, I guess is what they call it) and they moved a couple of strands of hair and called it a day. Before I knew it, I was onstage, and I was off just as soon. I was surprisingly relaxed — you don’t get the feeling that a bajillion people are watching you on TV because you can’t seem them watching you!

I left the studio right after my segment (I didn’t stick around for American Idol’s Michael Johns’ performance…) because I wanted to make sure Quizlet was going to stay afloat with the deluge of traffic. It did indeed get pretty slow, but it never went down. We’ve made some pretty significant architecture changes (I definitely have some smart and talented people working on the servers now) and so the site should be pretty snappy these days, and getting snappier all the time.

And then we were off again, flying back to Oakland (can’t miss any more school!) … And that was the trip. Très Amusant!

Random note: You may have noticed the new tagging suggestions feature on the Create Set page and the switch from spaces to commas as separators for tags. In general I think the tagging system is more robust now. It also takes foreign language words as tags now, whereas before it only took numbers and the English alphabet.

Hey all–

I just wrapped up development on a new home page for non-logged-in users. The page had had the same exact design since Quizlet launched more than a year ago. The “Top 5″ thing had a great run, but everything needs to get retired at some point. The new design presents a lot more dynamic information and cuts down on plain boring text.

In case you’re wondering, the new picture is a picture of me having breakfast (!) when I was about 10. I just felt like using it…haha.

I also shot a new demo video, available here: http://quizlet.com/demo/. I would say it’s a big improvement over anything I’ve done before

On top of these improvements, I’ve made several bug fixes. Most notably, the ending analysis from the Learn page is back in Internet Explorer after a month-long vacation. I made Space Race wrap text so huge scrolling wouldn’t happen as much. I’ve also been working on a few things that should reduce static file sizes to make Quizlet load a little bit faster. Lastly, I upgraded this blog Wordpress 2.5.

In other news, it’s pretty much assured that I’ll be going to MIT. They gave me a pretty impressive financial aid package, and it should be a fun place to be. I’ll be in Boston Tuesday-Sunday visiting MIT for their Campus Preview Weekend, so if anyone’s in Boston and wants to meet up, send me an email (andrew at quizlet).

There are a lot of things I’m working on simultaneously, and I thought I’d let you know what they are and how they’re doing.

New Learn Mode
Since I posted a preview of the new learn mode, I’ve been playing with it a lot, and taking feedback from all of you guys, and I’ve decided that design is a little too flashy. It looks really cool, but it’s not quite as useful as the current version. While I’m on the subject, I’m aware that the current learn mode has been having some data errors, and so it is among my first priorities to rebuild the learn mode, mostly to emulate the current version but in a more reliable way.

Quizlet Queries for Quid
A few months ago I started a project to donate. Together we raised more than $720 dollars for schools across the country. Wow! If you visit the project page, you may notice that the total looks less than that. This is because one of the projects we funded got canceled by the teacher, and my donation of $400 was detached from the project, along with a couple other Quizlet donors. It still went to a good cause though - DonorsChoose just redirected the money to other projects.

The other day I got a packet in the mail from a school in Louisiana that had received 7 Scrabble boards because of our donations. It had 30 letters from thankful students and some great pictures of Scrabble action. It was definitely cool to see the direct result of our donations, so thank you all! If I get time I’ll try to post some of the letters.

Reliability and Uptime
I admit, the last 3 weeks haven’t been the greatest in terms of reliability on the site. Since I posted about needing a Systems Engineer, I’ve gotten some good responses. I’m in the process of interviewing several of them now, but I’m also still taking applications. Here’s the craigslist ad. In the meantime, I’ve implemented some improvements to the MySQL architecture that seem to have stopped the daily downtime temporarily, but we still need some robust long-term solutions in place before I’ll be happy.

Advertising
You may have noticed some changes in the advertising displayed on the site. It is my goal not to detract from the quality and message of Quizlet, while still making enough money to support it. I’ve recently banned the “When will you die?” ad, due to user complaints. Please understand that Quizlet has to have ads to stay up, but if you think any of the ads cross the line, please let me know via the “feedback” link in the top right corner.

Press
Quizlet is in several current and upcoming stories in the press. I recently did an interview with PC World that will appear shortly. The reporter has already posted a transcript of the interview on his blog. By the way, I’m 18 now (as of December), not 17 as a few people have reported. I also recently spoke on a panel at SMX West, a search marketing conference. Pictures are here

Translations
Translation of the Quizlet interface is going extremely well. Translations for German, Spanish, and Albanian are all about 80% done, and other languages are in progress as well. Right now I don’t need any more translators, as I want to get the first revision of the translation software live and usable to you before I find more translators.

…And that’s all I have for ya now. There are a couple things I can’t talk about just yet but hopefully in a few weeks I’ll have some special announcements. -Andrew

I just built this super cool system for translating Quizlet’s interface into different languages. You can already use Quizlet to type in data in other languages, but this will actually translate Quizlet’s English interface (the navigation, the instructions, etc.) into other languages.

It’s ready to be translated into any language (except maybe a right-to-left language like Hebrew). So if you’re fluent in any language other than English, send me an email at andrew@(quizlet’s domain) with what language you can translate Quizlet into and a little about yourself and your fluency level. Experience with (very) basic HTML will help you, but it’s not strictly required. You will receive credit in the footer of every page on the site for people using your language. The system for translating the site is super slick - you’ll enjoy it!

I’m also looking for an expert systems engineer to work on making Quizlet faster. If you’re interested, I’ve posted the details on Craigslist, and I won’t repeat them here. Thanks y’all!

Hey everyone. I’m back!

And guess what today is? …. Quizlet’s birthday! Quizlet launched to the world on January 17, 2007. And I’m very proud to say Quizlet surpassed 100,000 registered users a week before turning one.

I’ve been working on a new version of the Learn mode for quite a while now, and I was hoping to have it out for the big b-day, but that’s not happening. But you do get this awesome sneak peek video of what it’s going to look like! I’m hoping to release it in the next two weeks or so. It still needs a lot of testing and quality assurance.

And in case you’ve been keeping score at home, I’ve been accepted at MIT. Lots of good news these days

The Quizlet Queries for Quid program is going strong - the latest count puts our combined fundraising total at $770! That’s just about a third of my overall goal of raising $2,512 dollars. We can definitely do it, we just need your help.

What is Quizlet Queries for Quid? Well, if you haven’t seen the original blog post about this, check that out.

I’ve just added two new proposals to the challenge:

The first one will get a camera for a journalism class in Oakland, CA, a city just ten minutes away from where I live (or shall I say, Quizlet world headquarters ) The journalism class at my high school (in which I’m the editor of our website, The Cougar Online) is fortunate enough to have several cameras, and they are absolutely essential to our operation.

The second one is also local for me - it will buy a refrigerator for a class of special-needs students in San Jose, CA, which is about an hour away from Quizlet HQ. This is an incredible idea. To quote their request:

The students would only be serving coffee to school staff. I know my students can make lattes. All they need is a little practice. Also, the students would be learning the skills necessary to run or manage a store. The students would be using math to perform inventory, budgeting and other accounting principles. The students would be practicing Language Arts by composing email orders and taking other forms of correspondence. The students would learn to initiate in polite customer interactions.

Our problem is that we have no refrigerator to store our milk, water and espresso beans. We are hoping that we can get a refrigerator so that we can finalize and check off all equipment needed to start this program. We have everything but a refrigerator.

Is that awesome or what? We’re still working on two other proposals, getting a color printer for a school in Louisiana and helping students in North Carolina build a trashcan holder. If you haven’t already, now’s your chance to donate. We only need to raise $1,742 more dollars to reach our goal. If you can’t, please encourage your parents and friends to donate.

I’d like to recognize the twelve Quizlet users who have donated already:

• Mr. Kevin Hoogheem
• Mr. Alan Margulius
• Ms. Cristina Lopez
• Mr. Erik Heerlein
• Mr. Kevin James (twice!)
• Ms. Bettina Mok
• Anonymous
• Mr. Neil Kelty
• Mr. Max McBride
• Mrs. Debra Della Silva
• Ms. Jeanetta Mish
• Mr. Andrew Sutherland (me!)

As I promised in the original blog post, anyone who donates through the Quizlet Queries for Quid program will get all ads on Quizlet forever removed from their accounts, and a little icon on their dashboards. To people on that list, send me a message and I’ll set you up with the special settings. Thank you for your generosity!

While we’re here, let’s talk about Quizlet a little bit. Since the last post about performance problems, I’ve made several key changes to make Quizlet faster and more reliable. Uptime and average pageload times have improved a lot. I’ve also overhauled the Search page (it still has a long way to go though, in terms of returning good results). I’ve been making lots of back-end changes that are unnoticeable to you guys, but certainly make everything run smoother behind the scenes.

Last, a few life updates: I submitted my applications to UC Berkeley and UCLA last night! It was a great feeling - I went out for a post-midnight celebration with a friend (I sent mine in in the afternoon, but he squeezed his in 25 minutes before the deadline!) to a local 24hr burger joint. It was awesome. Also, I will find out about my MIT application in exactly two weeks! Not to mention my 18th birthday is in eight days! Among other (less scrupulous) rights, I’ll get to vote for the first time in time for the presidential primaries. Yay growing up and going to college