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. Sorry for the rough stretch today. I just got Quizlet back up after some pretty heinous downtime. Everything should be 100% back to normal, and none of your data should be lost. Feel free to moan in the comments.

UPDATE: Some users have reported finding their groups deleted. I’ve tracked this problem down to some code on the groups page that will delete a group when there are no members in the group. When the Quizlet database was up-and-down today, sometimes the users table was not working but the groups were. So groups that were visited when the users temporarily disappeared may have gotten deleted. Fortunately I have a back-up from early this morning with all of the groups. It looks like about 15 groups may have been deleted. I’m going to work on getting those back up as soon as possible. Sorry for the trouble.

UPDATE 2: Restoring the data from today’s early-morning backup went very smoothly. All deleted groups should be back up. Post in the comments if you’re still out. Sorry again.

I’m super excited to announce that I’ve launched forums on Quizlet. I announced my intention to build them back in March, but never got around to finessing the administration parts of it until recently.

Why forums? Because they’re oh-so-useful. They can provide communication in a way that discussion can’t. Last week, during my finals, I wished Quizlet had forums when my entire French class was studying at the same time, and we needed to talk about which words were going to be added to our test at the last minute. Before forums, we had to do kludges like this.

Each group has its own private forum, only viewable to members of its group. Group admins can delete individual posts and whole threads in their forums, as well as make stickies and close topics. These forum threads will be displayed in the group page as well as well as the main forum section.

There are also public forums, accessible to anyone. The goal with these is to become a language forum, where users can ask vocabulary questions and discuss usage. These forums will be closely moderated by myself and NeilKelty. Note: there is no “Lounge” forum, and I currently have no intention of making one.

By the way - I’m going to “soft launch” them today, meaning that they’re a little green and not thoroughly tested. So you can only get there through your group page or by a direct link to http://quizlet.com/forums … In the next few days — possibly tomorrow — there will be a link among the “My Dashboard” and “Create Set” links.

The more feedback you all have on this the better. Send in your comments!

P.S. Perhaps you’re wondering about the new Learn mode. Well I was using it to study for my finals this past week and it’s very sexy and all but it just isn’t as useful and functional as the current one. The current one has problems, sure - it can get very stop-and-go when a lot of people are online - but it’s proven to work well. I just want to make sure the new one is better than the old one.

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

Hey y’all - it’s been awhile. I don’t have any new features to announce tonight, but I’d just like to take this time to keep you in the loop about what’s going on inside Quizlet right now.

In the past few weeks - especially the past few days - Quizlet has become intolerably slow at times. The service is sometimes super speedy, but sometimes laggy or even unresponsive.

This morning I made some big changes to some of the database configuration. The reoccurring problem some of you may have noticed with the “Flagrant System Error” appears to be over with. I’ve taken care of the problem (too many mysql db connections) that was causing all of the previous database downtime.

Fixing that problem may have caused other problems - it’s too early to tell. What I can say is that Quizlet should be online a greater percentage of the time, but it may still be slow.

These problems are growing pains - which is a good thing in a way. The problems mostly appear in peak activity times, which is usually the middle of the day on weekdays. Quizlet is averaging about 120,000 page views per weekday - a lot of traffic for a single server.

Moving into the future, these performance problems are my first priority. In the immediate future, I’m putting all my Quizlet time into improving Quizlet’s performance over adding new features. One thing that’s coming in the near future is an overhaul of the Search page, which has a tendency of timing out of late. I use Quizlet all the time too, so it hurts me just as much as anyone when it has problems.

The problem is that while I’ve built quite a few websites in my day, none of them have ever seen the kind of high-performance needs that Quizlet has. So I’ve been feeling around in the dark to some extent up until now when it comes to performance. Now I’m being a lot more proactive about it, and I have several people helping with the site’s performance now. I could still use more help however, so if you are a mysql/apache/solaris expert and you’re interested in getting involved in Quizlet, send an email to andrew/quizlet.com.

Because I discussed it earlier, I thought I’d let you all know that my MIT application is all sent in and done with. I’ll find out. You can bet your boots that Quizlet factored heavily into my application - so thank you all for helping it grow and reach where it is today.