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