Jon On Tech

It ain’t that I’m questionin’ you.
To take part in any quiz.
It’s just that I ain’t got no watch
An’ you keep askin’ me what time it is
- IF YOU GOTTA GO, GO NOW

A Quiz

Right, the quiz. It all started when I got invited to play some dumb-ass quiz on QuizTweet.com. Something about Which Mixed Drink Would I Be. Now I only drink beer these days, so I ain’t no mixed drink at all. But all the CMS cool kids were turning out to be Martini’s, so I bowed to the pressure to prove I was different. QuizTweet is pretty sneaky as once you’ve invested time and energy answering the questions, it then asks you for your Twitter creds so it can tweet your results. You find out how you’ve done at the same time as the world finds out. So I break my own rules and give the QuizTweet app access to my Twitter account. And it doesn’t really warn you either. @QuizTweet – if you’re reading this, I really think you need to add in a notification screen so people realise what is about to happen.

Once I’d sold my soul and creds to QuizTweet, I figured I’d try to set my own quiz up. The interface is pretty sweet and I was done in 20 minutes. You first define the different possible outcomes (with a description and an easy-to-select image), and then write the questions. For each question, you need to write an answer for each outcome. Which means I needed 13 possible responses for each question. This is far too many – I wish that I could assign multiple outcome to the same question response. The screenshot belows shows the kind of interface you get for each question. I’ve only shown 4 of the 13 response form elements though.

I’ve no idea how the system selects the outcome. I presume that it picks the outcome with the most responses, and is random in the event of a tie. In my quiz, I’m guessing selecting 3/10 questions for a certain outcome will be enough. If I’d known how popular the stupid thing would become, I’d have given the questions more thought! As of now, over 600 tweeps have taken the quiz and it has made page 1 of the Top Quizzes. It’s even “Trending” which isn’t bad considering the small target audience. The annoying way that it tweets the results for you also makes it very viral. I think QuizTweet has potential.

For those that are wondering, the 13 possible outcomes are Alfresco, Alterian, Day, Drupal, EMC Documentum, EPiServer, Fatwire, MOSS (SharePoint), Notepad, Open Text, SDL Tridion, Vignette and WordPress. Day was added late. Alfresco and MOSS added even later. The choice of what was included was pretty random – they are systems I know something about, and are not too close to one another.  I really liked the cheap marketing stunt from @martinvm with this tweet claiming to have done the quiz and got GX WebManager – even though it wasn’t an option. Nice work, Mr Product Manager.

As QuizTweet doesn’t let me see the results, I am monitoring them via a Twitter Search and am getting them emailed to me via Twilert. If people are interested, I’ll post them in a couple of days.

In case you were wondering, it turns out I’m not different from the other CMS nerds. I’m also a Martini. If you have the urge, you can play the CMS Quiz here. And if you’re really impressed or truly horrified by the result it gave you, please leave a comment.

Some Beers

If you don’t live near London, you can stop reading now. Maybe do the quiz again. However, if you do live near London and you’re still reading, I figured I might as well plug the Last Thursday CMS drinks. A few people get together over some beers and talk about Content Management, the web industry and other random things. We meet on the last Thursday of every month. It is a bit like the CMS/Pub/London drinks we used to do about 5 years ago. If you’d like to find out more, have a look at Meetup.com Event. Everyone is welcome. The only rule (especially for CMS vendors) is no hard selling please. Any attempt to sell anything to anyone must be preceded by buying a round of drinks for everyone within earshot. Note that although one of the organisers works for Squiz.Net, the event is in no way affliated with or sponsored by any vendor.

So far there have been about 5 meetings, and they’ve been good fun. Hope to see some more of you there for interesting discussions. By the way, did you know that there is a Free Beer published under a Creative Commons License? That’s free as in speech, not free as in beer.

A Celebrity Visit

Some breaking news. There is going to be a Danish celebrity having some beers in London on July 2 – that’s next Thursday. Come along and get a beer and an autograph. The Danes don’t make beer, but if they did, it would probably be the best beer ever.