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!

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).