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March 17, 2007

Question Writer ist ein Berliner

You can now choose to use the German language for Question Writer's user interface for Quiz and Personal editions. Just download and install as usual, and where German is your default language, the whole interface and all labels and messages will appear in German.

german.gif

Many thanks to Michael Koops for the translation and interpretation.

March 08, 2007

More Feedback Control

There are also two new options that give more control over the feedback.

The first allows you to show the overall report at the end of the question feedback, in place of, or instead of, the report shown at the beginning. This can be a more natural ordering for some quizzes - it'll depend on what you're trying to achieve.

The second option allows you to force the quiz to send the results before showing any feedback or report. This is important where you need to know the results of the first attempt at a quiz, or where a quiz taker has failed a quiz. Showing the feedback first means that quiz takers might decide to close their web browser before the results are sent if they see they haven't performed well in the report.

March 06, 2007

Better Best Effort Service

A free results-by-email service is provided alongside Question Writer - this is so that you can put your quizzes online and get back people's results and responses. It uses internet servers to accomplish this I've described it as a 'best-effort' service. That means you shouldn't run your business with it, or use it to gather vital end-of-term assessment data. It's a convenience for low-stakes stuff.

However, I'm trying to make it as reliable as possible, and really make the best-effort. So when publishing with the latest version of Question Writer, it'll now send the results through a new server that has 100% redundant hosting (it distributes the service across a number of servers locally). Furthermore, if the primary server is not available for any reason, the quiz will switch and try to send through the secondary server, located in a different geographic location - it'll continue switching back and forth until it has successfully sent the results.

March 05, 2007

New Updates

Some significant updates today for Quiz Edition. I'm going to blog these in more detail this week, but I wanted to let you know immediately about the improvements in case these are something you're waiting on.

1. Better Best Effort Results-by-Email server (Two servers online now, in case one is down or unreachable for any length of time)

2. Option to send results by e-mail before showing any feedback (so users can't prevent results from being sent after seeing the report and feedback)

3. Option to show report at the end of question feedback rather than the beginning.

4. Improved handling for .gif files (Although gif transparency not yet supported)