Now there’s a feed of the latest quizzes on Quizify that you can subscribe to in your newsreader of choice. Get it at http://quizify.com/latest.xml.
Keep up with the latest quizzes
July 6th, 2010Now with user pages
July 3rd, 2010Now when you create an account you will be prompted for a username which is used for your profile, such as mine, http://quizify.com/users/mfagan. The profile is pretty simple now, showing your photo and a list of quizzes you’ve made. Your username is also displayed wherever the quiz is listed so that you get proper credit. It’s now easy to jump from doing a quiz, to the user who created it, to other quizzes created by that user, so this should be a useful new way to find quizzes.
Save your quizzes!
June 29th, 2010Up until now, Quizify has acted more like a demo than a really useful website. That changes today, as you can log in (using Facebook for now), and save your quizzes. When you log in, you’ll see all the quizzes you’ve created, quizzes created by others that you’ve used, and popular quizzes overall. Each quiz has a fairly simple URL that you can share with others.
Note that all quizzes are completely public. Right now quizzes don’t list their creator, but that’s coming soon.
There’s not too much more to say… hopefully everything works as intended; be sure to send in bug reports and feedback.
Enjoy 
at Quizify.com
Update: I forgot to mention that as long as you’re logged in and running saved quizzes, Quizify keeps some track of your progress. If your quiz is made up of multiple question sets, the quiz starts off as set 1, and advances to showing sets 1+2 when you’ve done well on the first set. This progress is now saved so that you don’t have to start a quiz from zero if you are running the same quiz again.
New question type: Image Identification
April 19th, 2010I’m pretty excited about this new feature, because this feature was the only feature in the original quiz tool I built that inspired me to make Quizify.
The idea of these questions is you input a list of items, then you are shown an image of one of them, and you have to guess which it is. I made it originally for a biology course, but it has a wide variety of uses, and the best part is that you don’t have to find the images yourself to make the quiz, that’s done for you. Unlike other question types on Quizify, Image Identification is multiple choice. Here is a very simple example to illustrate it: identify the large African mammal. It takes just a few seconds to build a very powerful quiz this way.
The images come from an image search engine, currently Bing. Occasionally you may see in image that is broken, is the wrong image, or displays the answer in the question. When that happens, just click the “bad image” button and you won’t see that image again. Note that although the image search engine uses and adult filter, it is still possible to see inappropriate images through this.
Like everything else in Quizify, you can create a quiz with multiple sections, with some being image identification and some being of other types. So try it out, and let us know what you’ve used it for.
Quiz editing now far more powerful
March 30th, 2010I’ve made some significant improvements to the quiz editing page.
Before you could create a quiz by manual input or a URL from the home page, and then delete any unwanted sections.
That still works, but now you can add new sections right from the editor. So you could create a quiz by questions from two web pages and some typed-in questions. You can even re-order the sections.
The quiz editor now works standalone, so you can visit and bookmark quizify.com/edit directly.
Along with the improvements, the editor has also been fixed so that using the browser back button won’t cause any errors in editing. Going back will have no effect, as you can’t undo edits, but at least you won’t accidentally be deleting sections.
As usual, let us know how the changes work for you.
New: Acronyms and Abbreviations
March 27th, 2010A new question type today. Now any acronyms and abbreviations (as well as definition lists) are extracted from web pages and can be made into a quiz. This will work so long as the web page properly uses the acronym or abbr elements.
The UI for the quiz is pretty basic, and similar to the style used for definitions. As always, feedback welcome.
Links within questions, and other notes
March 26th, 2010Quizify is fairly unique in that it can generate questions from web pages. This is really neat (in my opinion 
) because questions aren’t just plain text but can include formatting, pictures, links, etc.
Unfortunately, as Tara noted, many of the links failed to work as they were relative links that didn’t get translated to work within Quizify. That’s all been fixed now, and links should all work just as well as they did on the web page that the quiz is based on. Let me know if you still experience any failing links.
In a related note, all links within questions are now set to open in a new window. It’s often annoying when links force themselves to open in new windows, but I think it’s the right choice for Quizify, as visiting a new page in the same window and then clicking the browser back but will ’cause the your quiz to get a bit missed up. An alternative would be for these links to open up in a frame within Quizify, which we might do instead.
Beyond this, I’ve made a variety of tweaks and bug fixes that should make everything a bit smoother. Terms and definitions now display in their original HTML when revealing the answer. Other fixes aren’t as obvious unless you were running a quiz that presented a particular bug.
Couple of Tweaks
March 8th, 2010I’ve made a number of changes, not all of which will be obvious. The quiz-taking UI is just a little bit cleaner and easier to use. I’ve moved information about wrong answers and alternate answers to the top instead of the bottom, among other things.
I’ve also made some changes to the algorithm that picks which question to ask you next. The same principles are used as before, but it should work a bit better, and you shouldn’t be quite as pestered with questions that you got wrong once being asked over and over again.
New feature: bad spelling is okay
February 27th, 2010Well, not exactly. But now, if you get an answer “correct” but spell it wrong, you do advance to the next question. At the same time, Quizify will tell you about the mistake and what the correct spelling is, and you will still be penalized a tiny bit, so similar to getting a question wrong, you will be asked that question more often to make sure you get the hang of spelling it correctly.
Overall this should make the experience smoother and less frustrating, while still encouraging the complete correct answer.
For those interested in the technical details, this feature is currently using the Yahoo Spelling Suggestion API.
This feature went live a couple of days ago (post Quizify launch), but there was no blog yet to post it on. If you have any feedback on how the spelling feature has worked for you, let us know in the comments.