I just finished integrating the Jetfire Quiz into the system. The quiz that I wrote using the Jetfire scripting language was quite simple:

• What is your name? __________
  
• Are you over 18? (yes/no)
  
• Select an age category: 18 to 25, 26-35, 36 – 45, over 45
  
• How often do you go dancing in a year? ___
  

From a code perspective, the Quiz is a set of Questions and Answers. Answers may be text, numeric, yes/no, a selection from a list, date and time, and duration.

A new Web Control is provided (in the website) to iterate over the list of Questions and Answers, providing the user with the ability to input answers. The quiz can be viewed using this custom control.

The real reason for this blog is to brag about just how simple it is to write your own Quiz. My friend, Mo, wrote a quiz in 30 minutes this morning. Mo owns a Print shop in Ottawa, has a Computer Science degree from over 20 years ago and hasn't programmed in a whole lot of years. Mo is a smart guy, but not a programmer. He needed a little bit of help with syntax, but since he uses Excel extensively, he was a natural to write his first Jetfire workflow.

Since I hit him cold with "you are designing a quiz right now", most of the time was spent formulating the questions and answers about the travel quiz that he wanted to write. His travel quiz includes the following questions:

• What was your favorite destination? ________
  
• Select your Sex: Male, Female
  
• Select a destination: North America, Europe
  
• Select an age category: Under 18, 18 – 35, 36- 50, over 50
  
• How often do you travel in a year? ____
  

Less than five minutes later, I had the privilege of being the first to fill in his quiz.

Sound like fiction? With Jetfire, you upload the Jetfire code and start using it immediately. This is possible because Jetfire is a scripting language and re-uses the Question and Answer Web Control described above.

This blog sends kudos to screwturn.eu, the creators of a .NET open source wiki implementation.

TrackerRealm has been looking for a wiki for the past year that we can use for documentation. After assessing over half a dozen versions of incomplete projects, I was getting extremely frustrated. Then while looking for a new Blog engine one day, I noticed that the Blog engine company was using screwturn for their documentation – I went whoa! – this looks like a great wiki – I wonder how much it costs. Well, the price is right.

Why do I like screwturn wiki?

1. Ease of installation – it was installed on my PC in 10 minutes. (ScrewTurn store the page data in xml files vs a database)
   
2. Ease of skinning – I created a new theme for http://wiki.jetfire.ca in 30 minutes. (I am not a themes expert)
   
3. Ease of administration – putting the admin password in the web.config makes it easy to change. Adding new accounts is trivial.
   
4. New pages easily created
   
5. Ease in tailoring the templates, e.g. header, footer, side panels, etc
   

Easy sums up what I think about our new screwturn wiki.

I am writing this blog on my brand new blog editor – it's called Word 2007. I love Word. Word allows a user to post a blog to Blogger directly from Word 2007.

Word is simple - it lets me use an editor that I am familiar with and format my blog that way that I am comfortable with. And it has a spell checker.

How does it work?

1. Open Word 2007
   
2. Select New from the Office icon
   
3. Select 'Create new blog'
   
4. Enter Login information for Blogger
   
5. (optional) identify an image provider for uploading images (that you embed in Word)
   
6. Write Blogs in your favorite editor
   
7. Save a draft copy of your blog to polish off later or Publish the draft to your blogger
   
8. Once the Blog is finished, Publish the blog.
   

One gotcha is that once you publish the blog and close the Word Editor, you must use Blogger's editor, UNLESS you save a copy of the blog locally and then re-edit it.

That's it – enjoy.