It's that time of year agaaain! From Dec. 20-31, we'll be releasing 10 questions a day into our news quiz looking back at notable events of 2008. That's 12 months of goodness totaling 120 questions.
For anyone disconnecting over the holidays, the year in review questions will stay live through Jan. 5.
Last Wednesday we hosted a Newzwag classroom for a group of 25 Ruby developers who came to eat delicious pizza, drink beer, and learn how we scaled Rails. I personally had a lot of fun putting together the presentation and hosting the guys that showed up.
I presented an overview talk about database gotchas, and how to load test a session-based app. Daniel talked about his unique implementation of memcached as a temporary data store and bulk write mechanism.
The presentations were informed by all of our hands-on experience adapting our write-heavy quiz from it's capacity of 200 simultaneous users all the way up to 30,000 simultaneous users (a 25x efficiency upgrade!). Rails does scale, and just like any other app, requires custom software and hardware solutions to match a project's needs. Throwing hardware at it is the first solution, but analyzing each and every bottleneck all adds up.
We fully intended to record the whole event, but alas we were video camera-challenged... sorry!
Here's a link to the talks on Slideshare, click to download the pdf file.
Links from the talks:
If you have any questions, post 'em up in the comments.
Josh, our Lead Developer, has volunteered to talk and host The SF Ruby Meetup Group right here at our Maiden Lane headquarters tomorrow night. Daniel thinks he's off the hook, but he'll be there, too. The subject of the meeting will be Scaling Rails in which he'll talk about our experience (and by this I mean our development team) scaling our quiz during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
BTW: I was really tempted to write "I <3 Rubyes" as the headline but I guess I'll leave that for a custom print t-shirt. :)
Big day in the U.S. today ... The whole world is paying attention to what may be the most important presidential election in recent history. Though at this time the race is not over, it's clear that the Internet has played a central role the 2008 campaign and positions itself as a big (huge) winner. It's possible that this view from our San Francisco-based office is slightly subjective, but there is no doubt that the access to real-time information and mobile devices have encouraged people to participate, speak up, act, share, link, comment, connect.
We're happy to be part of this.
In the past month, our 2008 Elections Quiz has gotten noticed in a few client sites around the States: The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Times and the Miami Herald. Across sites, more than 10,000 new player accounts have been created... People from different party lines have given our quiz their vote of confidence by playing for hours at a time and for more than 30 minutes on average. No, we're not kidding. :)
We've been checking out our stats between the sites running the Election Quiz and it's interesting to note that though Democrats overall beat out Republicans on the Detroit Free Press and the Miami Herald sites in percentage of answers correct, percentage-wise Republicans on the Washington Times site beat out all groups on all sites.
In terms of questions, most of you did not know that Harry Truman (and not George Bush) had the lowest approval ratings in the history of the US presidency. Give 'em hell, Harry's rating was all of 22%, compared to Dubya's 24% from this September. The hardest question was that William Taft fared the worst in seeking re-election. The guy only had 8 electoral votes in 1912!
Many of the most difficult questions were historical trivia, but fun tidbits from the candidates, like Joe Biden claiming to never have had a drink, proved fairly difficult as well. Though a few questions were answered correctly by all users, there weren't any questions that all of you got wrong (rats!).
No one got all 50 buttons, but "mark b," an Independent immortalized on Mount Rushmore on the Detroit Free Press came the closest with 49.
Our 2008 Election Quiz is gaining some exposure (very mucho muy welcome) as it goes live in the Sunshine State at the Miami Herald. It's great timing as Florida takes center stage heading into the final week of the presidential campaign.
Another Web site is live with our 2008 Election Quiz, this time on the East Coast. The client is the Washington Times and you can test your political IQ here.
So, now we're wondering how they'll fare against the Midwest users over at the Detroit Free Press. We hope that the West Coast sites come aboard soon, too. Hint, hint!
At times when our attention span escapes we stumble upon fun / cool / interesting things... since we're all talking elections and more elections, an Elections wordle is in order :)
Image of http://wordle.net/
It's live. Our 2008 US Election Quiz is live. Show off your campaign knowledge and pick up some US history trivia along the way over here.
We launched Oct. 7 with 200 questions and have been adding 10 new ones six days a week. We plan to keep that up right up to election day.
The quiz is similar to Deadline and the Olympics one but we've introduced the idea of campaign buttons, which you collect as you move up the ranks. You can modify your profile settings to display a button in your collection, too.
You'll be off to a good start if you've been watching the debates since we've created a good chunk of questions based on the debates. And don't forget that we gave a you a few freebies in our last post.
Day in and day out, our entire Newzwag staff is tracking down each and every news tidbit you might find interesting (Example: "Japanese Aquarium Puts Dolphins on Weight-Loss Program").
And because of this constant hunt for news, we inevitably run into US election coverage every 6 nano-seconds (Seriously, I can't go buy a pack of smokes without running into 9 people trying to register me to vote - am Canadian, can't vote, stop asking me you hipster idiot).
So it's only natural that after being bombarded by constant coverage of the 2008 presidential election, that we decided to create an entire quiz devoted to the lengthy and intricate maze that is the crazy world of presidential politics.
To be sure, this has been no easy task. If you think politicians are good at not answering journalists' questions, try creating questions based off those non-answers. Miraculously, we have managed to accomplish this monstrous feat.
And just to entice you, Dear Reader, here a few kernels of presidential-awesome we've learned while creating our new quiz:
And on top of all that, we've even got questions on issues ("It's the economy, stupid"), the workings of government (apparently the Electoral College is NOT a school for would-be politicians), and day-to-day election coverage (another candidate mangled the English language!).
So stay tuned for the debut of our totally super awesome, and always informative/fun/hilarious Newzwag 2008 Presidential Election Quiz.
We are now live on ESPN too. Yipeeeeeeeee!
Take our Olympics quiz and challenge your friends.
Newzwag is a San Francisco-based company funded by Agence France-Presse (AFP). We develop technologies and ideas that bring one of the world's richest news resources to the rapidly evolving world of social media.
The Race Goes On: Now in Florida.
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