My new buddies! (I’ve got the helmet)

Hello Quizlet! It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? I’ve had a busy summer, and I thought you might like to hear about it. I had the great opportunity to spend 2 months volunteering for AmeriCorps and the Student Conservation Association. It was the best way I could spend my summer; it was refreshing, educative and very enjoyable.

The first month I spent in Pearlington, Mississippi, a town that was wiped away by Hurricane Katrina. Our SCA crew had ten people from all over the U.S., and we stayed in a small bunkhouse with another SCA crew of ten. Every day we went to work on various construction projects for victims of the hurricane. I don’t think very many people realize this, but the Gulf Coast area is still a huge mess two years after Katrina. They’ve made a ton of progress, but many many people are still living in their FEMA trailers. So we were helping local residents rebuild their houses by framing, hanging drywall, siding, mudding & taping, and various other constructions tasks.

Me nailing in scaffolding. Note that all the houses down there are built on huge stilts for the floods

After Mississippi, we flew over to Acadia National Park in Maine for another month of work. Our projects were very different in Acadia - we worked on trails instead of houses. We built bogwalks, cut back brush on miles and miles of trail, cleaned up beach trash, and constructed a heavily-used wheelchair-accessible trail. Acadia is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been - check out our photos of Maine to see if yourself.

That’s me in the foreground. We were building bogwalks for a muddy trail.

For any high schoolers out there interested in conservation and volunteering, I highly recommend you check out the SCA website. They do big crews over the summer (usually only a month long) but they also do weekend crews during the school year in many major cities. As a 3-year veteran to SCA, I can unequivocally say that it’s changed my life in many positive ways.

One more thing - I created a website (because that’s my favorite thing to do…) for all of my crew’s photos. Not everyone has posted theirs yet, but there are some damn good ones. You can also check out the album of just pictures of me if you’re interested.

Having some fun on one of our scarce laundry breaks

So now that I’m back, what’s next for Quizlet? Lots of stuff!

I’m going to try to make this the year of big growth for Quizlet. I’m hoping to bring a few more people into the company (send us an email if you’re interested). I’ve got plans for new features and organization. The first big task on the to-do list is an overhaul of the search page, which is getting pretty clunky with the plenitude of data you all have entered. By the way, Quizlet just passed the 40,000 registered users mark the other day. Sa-weeet!

School started here in California last week, so senior year here I come! Mmm I have to apply to college soon (in case you’re wondering, I’m gunning for MIT)…Hopefully all that won’t be too distracting.

Also, a big shout-out goes to my friend Neil who looked after Quizlet for me over the summer! As far as I can tell, Quizlet ran even smoother than I expected while I was gone.

Hope you guys are well, and I’m looking forward to another exciting year of Quizlet with everyone. Later!

There’s no better place to relax than in the grass…This is me with SCA people and pirate facepaint. Yar!

Hiya everyone. Today was the last day of school for me, so yippee! Junior year was hard, and now it’s done…

And now, like I said in the last post, I’m taking off. In exactly seven hours, I’ll be on a flight to Mobile, Albama. I’m going to be gone for two whole months, completely cut off from the Internet (read: Quizlet). Some hard manual labor will be a nice and healthy getaway from computer programming.

So now, some administrative stuff. As I will obviously be unable to answer support requests or add new features, don’t expect a lot of new things on Quizlet for a little while. I’m passing off the Quizlet reigns to Neil, a good friend of mine who knows Quizlet better than anyone (except for me). He’s been very gracious to take over support and general administration of the site while I’m gone. I’ll be returning around the 13th of August (with pictures for the blog, of course :))

Oh, and has anyone seen the stats on the About page recently? Quizlet has just passed one million terms entered into Quizlet. Good work, and thanks for using Quizlet!

Summer is coming! It’s getting warmer every day. The hellish descent into finals week is getting closer. And with the end of finals comes the joy that is summer vacation. Yes! Before I get into how awesome that is, let me just quickly note that the messages page has been updated to allow viewing of your back-and-forth communication between you and another user. Cool stuff.

……

Last night I went to the Facebook f8 hack-a-thon event. Yesterday Facebook announced a completely new platform that allows anyone to integrate their applications into Facebook. So for example, Quizlet could integrate into Facebook by allowing users to share their vocab sets via facebook’s friends system. There are a lot of cool things I could do with it, I just have to work out what would the most useful way of integrating some of Quizlet’s features into facebook might be (I’m open to suggestions).

Photo: flawedartist

Let me tell ya - the hack-a-thon event was pretty geeky. It was basically ~400 developers in a giant lounge with unlimited access to Red Bull, M&Ms, and gourmet Chinese food. And of course, plenty of lounge furniture and even a few giant TVs with Xbox consoles. Within this environment, there was some prolific hacking going on. Facebook had given us a platform to develop on, and so we all had our laptops to whip stuff up as fast as possible. By midnight, everyone would reconvene to show off what they had built in the preceding hours, and Facebook would hand out prizes. I sat next to a couple of people from last.fm and across from a bunch of people working for Obama ‘08. I didn’t accomplish anything particularly impressive with Quizlet integration, but I did play around enough to find some pretty significant security and functionality bugs in their system (which I’ve reported to Facebook). Unfortunately, I had to go home a little earlier because it was a school night and I had essays to write! So I didn’t get to see the results of all the programming that went on…Oh well.

……

My summer plans are about as unrelated to Quizlet and programming as they come - I’m spending eight weeks of my summer doing trail work and restoration with the Student Conservation Association. I’ll be completely incommunicado the entire time - no Quizlet, no email, no Internet, no phone. The only way to reach me will be snail mail. Hey, maybe I’ll post my address (when I get it) and you can send me cookies

The SCA is a national program that puts high school students on small volunteer crews that perform trail work and nature conservation in almost every national park. Last summer I spent four weeks in Rocky Mountain National Park building trails, smashing rocks, traversing glaciers, and making friends. It was, in honesty, a life-changing experience. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in volunteering and getting out of the city. It’s probably too late to sign up for a crew for this summer, but I highly recommend checking out it’s programs for both the coming school year and next summer. All the information is on their site.

Me crushing rocks on my SCA crew from last summer.

For this summer, I’ll be spending four weeks in the Bay Saint Louis area, and four weeks in Acadia National Park in Maine. My crew of eight people will be from all over the U.S. (Some of whom I’ve already met via Facebook - hey!) We’ll be working on who-knows-what. I’m really just looking forward to whatever they give me. It’s a chance to get out of the city, out of the world of computers, and into new cultures I’ve never experienced. I should arrive home quite a bit tanner and more muscular - working on Quizlet isn’t exactly a full body workout

Practically speaking, that means I won’t be able to answer support messages, write blog posts, or remove naughty sets. But never fear - I’ve got a few friends who should be able to step into my place for awhile and keep Quizlet humming while I’m gone. Because it will be summer vacation for most students, I’m expecting Quizlet traffic to slow down a bit, so the stress of keeping the site running should be less than it is now.

But after my summer SCA crew, Quizlet will be gearing up for a big 2008. I have several large-scale improvements, partnerships, and general expansions worked out already.

I’ll be gone from June 16 to August 13. My last day of school is Friday, June 15. Can anyone say “end-of-the-year party?”

Hey all. It’s been awhile since I last posted - sorry about that. Just want to give a status update…

Perhaps you’ve been noticing some intermittent slowness when using Quizlet. I’ve been noticing it too - 30 second load times for each page are no fun. Sometimes it’s nice and snappy, sometimes it’s agonizingly slow. I believe this is an issue with Quizlet’s host, and not any “growing pains” within Quizlet. Their site is slow at the same times that Quizlet is slow.

Apart from that, I’ve been making changes here and there to improve performance and fix bugs. There was a fiasco with smileys a few days ago, but they’re back up and usable again. There’s nothing epic to say here in this post…Sorry

[UPDATE May 29th, 2007]
I just twiddled with some settings a bit and improved some mysql settings - these slowness problems should be fixed. You should notice some extra snap in the page loads now. I especially helped out the Quizmarklet, which is AT LEAST 15x faster now. It’s now very enjoyable to use. Yay.

I just made some great updates to the Quizmarklet. Here’s what it can now do:

• User-contributed definitions. Before, it was just using the (excellent) WordNet dictionary, but I have now expanded it to use the ever-expanding word lists from Quizlet’s users. It only uses words that are in sets open to everyone. User-contributed definitions are marked specially with yellow
• It now has better handling of plural words - so it will pickup on “matrices” as a definition for “matrix” and “cherries” for “cherry.”
• Gmail support! I managed to wade through the jungle of Gmail’s code enough find and correct the problem. The solution - appending a <body> tag to a <frameset> page - was both brilliant and insane (thanks to Fyorl for the tip). To all you programmers out there, I intend to write a blog post sometime soon about creating the bookmarklet.
• Supporting Gmail also means supporting pretty much every webpage on the Internet. If you run into a page that doesn’t work, send me a note in the comments.
• The bookmarklet itself (the thing you save in your bookmarks bar) now has a version number (1.02). Everyone who used the old version should upgrade by resaving it to their bookmarks bar.
• Various compatibility and display fixes were also added.

An interesting tidbit I forgot to mention last time is that the Quizmarklet records the definitions you save to Quizlet (from the official dictionary only, not the user-contributed stuff). It will then rank the most often chosen definition and show them at the top of the list. This has two benefits: 1) You see the most ‘universal’ definition first. 2) I get some stat-tracking capabilities to see how I can improve the Quizmarklet.

I still consider the Quizmarklet to be in “pre-release” mode, meaning it’s not finished. That means I’m still changing things, and I’m not going to promote it outside of the blog for now. But when it’s ready, I think it has a lot of potential to be a part of Quizlet’s core functionality/workflow. More on that later…

Lastly, I had some trouble getting it started up in Internet Explorer. I only use Macs, so it’s hard for me to dig into the problem. I have access to both version 6 and 7 of IE via Parallels, but I have this strange feeling that they’re not behaving like regular IE. I can get the bookmarklet to boot up on the Quizmarklet’s page itself, but I can’t get it to save into the “Links” bar via dragging. I can circumvent that by going to “Add to Favorites” and selecting the links bar, which saves the Quizmarklet correctly. But then it doesn’t seem to function at all. So if anyone has some insight or wouldn’t mind helping to discover the problem, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks! I hope you enjoy the new version. Let me know how it goes for you, as always.

Good morning! It’s been a rough day, with Quizlet experiencing its first major downtime ever. Quizlet is now back and rolling as normal. I believe the problem started around 6 AM, and has just been resolved at 12:45 PM. My sincerest apologies go out to everyone who couldn’t use Quizlet this morning.

Some errant multi-gigabyte server log files were running up my disk space and causing the MySQL server to not allow new data and eventually just shut off. The good news is that no data was lost, and everything can just pick up where it left off. This isn’t really my area of expertise, so I’m digging in and figuring out why all this happened and how I can prevent it in the future. It’s safe for the immediate future.

I arrived at school this morning and several friends informed me that Quizlet was down. I fortunately arrived early enough to run home and start figuring out the problem (contacting my host, Joyent) before school. I got back to school (we’re taking those stupid STAR standardized tests all this week) and fortunately I was in a room with plenty of computers so I could monitor the bringing-up progress. Then just a few minutes ago Joyent’s support staff came to my rescue and got everything back up. I’m on lunch break now, but I’ll be available later today to resolve issues. If you have any problems, please send me a message.

-Andrew