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!

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

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

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!

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.

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).

Space Race

The object of the game is to kill words before they cross the screen. You type in your answers (then press enter) into the input box at the bottom, and if your answer matches any of the words scrolling across the screen, it will fade away and die. When a word gets all the way across the screen, it will tell you what you missed and make you type it in. You get to keep playing until you lose 2 words in a row without getting one correct answer.

The game gets harder as time passes - words appear in greater frequency the higher level you get. At some point, it’s just too overwhelming.

You score more points the higher level you are. You can score a lot more points by being correct over a large number of consecutive words. Every miss loses you 10 points.

When you’re done, your high score is saved and compared to everyone else who played Space Race on the same set. Can anyone beat me on the U.S. State Capitals?

To make room for the new game, I decided I needed to redo the buttons for the different study modes. Here’s how they looked before:

And now…

The new kind also has a special effect - it expands when you hover over it.

Let me know what you think!

Update: A couple hours after the release I accidentally broke most studying modes for Internet Explorer users. It should work fine now. Sorry!

Update 2: I’ve adjusted it to wrap text on particularly long words. Hopefully that works better for y’all.

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

We just recovered from a couple hours of downtime. It wasn’t too fun, for you or for me. The database that was holding each set’s words and definitions had been crashing for the past few days, causing daily downtime (ack!). So tonight I decided just repairing it each time wouldn’t do, so I converted some of the database architecture to a (hopefully) better and more robust state. I also temporarily disabled the “online now” icons, which were causing some problems. I’m hoping to reinstate those as soon as possible - but right now I want to make sure the site just stays up, you know?

We’re in the process of hiring a sysadmin, so we should have a lot more expertise on this problem soon. Going down every evening is not acceptable. Sorry to everyone who couldn’t use it while the site was down.