Triviathis blog

We're back!

2009-01-14T07:34:00.000-08:00

Back from a quick break. Here are some highlights of goings-on around here:

Traffic spike! - we've gotten a lot more traffic lately. More signups and more people just looking for answers to questions.
Facebook app in progress - we're building an app for facebook!

Happy New Year and National Trivia Day in just a few days!

2008-12-27T12:52:00.000-08:00

Advanced Happy New Year to everyone. Try some New Year's trivia questions.

January 4 is National Trivia Day. Get your friends to play some trivia with you!

Facebook trivia app

2008-12-19T10:17:00.000-08:00

We will be releasing a Facebook app to play trivia in a few weeks. It will largely have the same functionality as triviathis.com. If you have any suggestions for things you would like to see in the app please leave a comment.

Christmas trivia!

2008-12-16T21:18:00.000-08:00

Christmas is approaching. Here's some fun trivia to go with it:
http://triviathis.com/tags/christmas

Some samples:

Who/What is Parson Brown in the Christmas song "Winter Wonderland"?
How do you say "Merry Christmas" in France?
What did the traffic cop yell to Frosty in "Frosty the Snowman"?
What's the dog's name in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"?
From the movie "It's a Wonderful Life", how do you know an angel has received its wings?

Triviathis gets a new look!

2008-12-11T18:53:00.000-08:00

We've completely changed the look of Triviathis! We're aiming for the new look to give Triviathis more of a game-y feel and be less business-ey. Let us know your comments!

Redesign and Scoring

2008-12-10T13:18:00.000-08:00

Two upcoming features:

Redesign: We're doing a full redesign of the site. Should go live in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
Scoring: We're going to roll out the scoring system bit by bit starting with global top scores: most questions answered, greatest percentage correct, greatest number correct. After that we're planning on drilling down these categories of scoring by tag so users can see where they rank highest based on different topics.

More cool layout, more traffic

2008-12-09T14:47:00.000-08:00

We've modified the layout a little more to be more friendly and pretty. We're working on creating different ways to play trivia as well and will have them available through the "feature" box on the homepage soon.

Traffic is up and we're getting crawled by Google faster now.

We've submitted to the SXSW Web Awards 2009 contest in the Games category as well, so stay tuned on that.

Thanksgiving trivia

2008-11-23T14:37:00.001-08:00

Check out some Thanksgiving trivia to play around the holidays.

More upcoming features!

2008-11-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

Soon we'll be adding a lot of new functionality:

Search: search for a keyword and get trivia based on that
User pages: share information about yourself with the community
Embed and share: share trivia questions outside of triviathis. Post them on other websites and share the fun
Group play version: we're working on a version of the site that you can use to play with a group. It's designed to be used for two or more people and you can play it on a big projector too if you want. Questions will be timed and the answer and explanation will be revealed when the timer runs out. You can click at your own pace to proceed to the next question.

Let us know your feedback!

Show answered questions

2008-11-15T08:56:00.000-08:00

We've added one new feature: Show/Hide answered questions. Previously if you answered a question it disappeared forever and you had to logout to view it. We've now added a link at the top right above the "logout" button (you must be logged in to see it) to show all the questions you've already answered. You can answer these questions again and again as many times as you want. It will not count for or aganist your score in any way.

Triviathis.com makes official debut today

2008-10-29T08:16:00.000-07:00

Triviathis.com officially launches in beta today. We're starting our publicity campaign today as well.

Current features:

Tagging
Friendly urls
AJAX answering
Drag-and-drop sortable answers
Question moderation
Site search using Google

Upcoming features:

Marking questions as owned by certain users (all questions you currently enter are saved to your username, it's just not displayed yet)
Top scores
Duplicate question helper when you submit a question
User-based moderation for questions
User pages
Scoring for submitting questions
Question rating
Locally powered search. Search for keywords and answer questions straight from your search.

More random, less spam

2008-11-11T18:31:00.000-08:00

We've added two new features:

Random trivia: A random trivia button to the main navigation that you can hit anytime to get a random set of questions
Less spam: There is now a CAPTCHA on the new user signup page to prevent automated signups and spam from creeping into Triviathis. We haven't had any problems with this yet, but it is a preventative measure to ensure quality.

We're planning on adding a randomization by tag option and also sorting by difficulty levels soon.

IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAND

2008-11-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

We hit over 100 questions today! Absurdly rapid growth expected.. stay tuned.

New stuff!

2008-11-08T10:51:00.000-08:00

We've added a couple things:

Question creator (user) shows up in question info area
Question rules, guidelines and general help
A brief privacy policy
An RSS feed for the homepage so you can monitor by RSS when we get new questions

We're going to be doing some performance optimization in the next few weeks and adding a lot of new features as well. Stay tuned!

Different uses for triviathis

2008-11-08T16:28:00.000-08:00

Triviathis's uses span beyond just making everyday interesting trivia questions:

Use it as a study aid. Create questions for yourself or to share with your classmates to study from like a practice test. Tag them with the title of your course or class name. Need to answer a question more than once? Just log out.
Learn things you didn't know in a different way. Have a topic you're curious about? Search or find a tag that matches what you're interested in and answer some trivia on it.
Tell the world something interesting that you couldn't put elsewhere on the web. Wikipedia is designed for very encyclopedia-ish knowledge, not trivia. Blogs aren't always well read or very good mediums for putting together information. Triviathis is the perfect place to put a fact that you may not find anywhere else.

Triviathis launches!

2008-10-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

triviathis.com officially launches in pre-beta stage. We'll be adding a bunch of stuff later.

Perpetual feedback thread

2008-10-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

Until we have a more solid system in place to collect feedback we will be using this blog post. Feel free to post your complaints, ideas, suggestions, praise and such here. You must have an OpenID or Google account in order to post a comment.

We're doing well on Google!

2008-10-24T12:17:00.000-07:00

First page for 'george trivia', second page for 'kramer trivia'. Google is indexing pages nicely and we're already getting traffic from it.

Question stats

2008-10-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

One new feature we're planning for Triviathis: question statistics. We'll show statistics for each question such as how many people selected each answer and the number of total answers.

It'll give everyone a nice insight to just how cool they are for answering correctly when everyone else does not.

Trivia 2.0

2008-10-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

Triviathis is taking trivia to web 2.0. Various aspects of the web have been left behind in the 2.0 craze, many people believing that 2.0 methods and technologies are best used for new applications and to do new things. We think that trivia is one of those pieces of the web that has been left behind in the 2.0 craze and has many ways to benefit from new technologies such as AJAX. Some technologies and ideas Triviathis uses and plans to use are:

AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) - for answering trivia questions - stay on the same page when answering a question
OpenID - not yet implemented, but will allow users to login using an openid service. This makes it faster and easier for users to start posting questions and saving their scores. Tons of people already have openids; if you have an account on the following sites you have an openid: Blogger, LiveJournal, AOL, Flickr, Technorati, WordPress. Check out openid.net for more info.
Tagging - traditional categories limit taxonomy. Tagging isn't a perfect system, but allows you to browse through trivia however you want. TV shows? How about only Seinfeld trivia? Why not just Kramer?
Lightweight CSS-based layout - a display trend of 2.0. Triviathis uses CSS to complement its already lightweight user interface by making it even more lightweight in the display code keeping pages easier to find in search engines and more accessible to disabled users.
Ruby on Rails - the webframework of web 2.0. RoR is what powers Triviathis on the backend.
Answer however many you want - user choice and empowerment is a key element of web 2.0. We don't make you take full quizzes. Answer questions one at a time.. skip whichever ones you want.

Features to come

2008-10-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a partial list of some things we'll be adding shortly:

User pages
Top scores
Points for submitting questions
Search
Rating and user moderation of questions