Surfarama

A little over a year ago I discovered a Cold Fusion Q & A site, cfanswers.org (via Matt Haughey). I don’t know anything about CF, but I was totally taken by the way the site was put together…it was what Yahoo! Answers and the rest of them should be like. Beautifully simple and with just the right attention to UI to make it a pleasure to use. Stuff like having links to download .txt versions of particular answers, and nice ajax flourishes for rating answers etc. It was just really well done, so it’s sad to see that the site hasn’t survived and the domain now seems to be dead.

The good news is that I was so taken by it that I wanted to develop something similar in PHP (unsurprisingly cfanswers.org was developed in CF)…something that could be usefully employed to power any kind of niche community Q & A site. So I started working on it slowly with Indi nearly a year ago and we’ve finally got something that feels like it is ready for use…

I have in mind a few different topics of interest that would be well served by a community style Q & A site, but the first one we’re launching is for High School students, a peer to peer homework help site called Schoolworking.com. We’ve been developing the site on the Homeworkhelp.co.nz domain, and by virtue of having a pretty good generic domain the site has attracted about 100 members before announcing it, although the depth of questions and answers is still pretty lite. Having got it to the current state we decided to move it to the Schoolworking.com domain just because there seemed no good reason to limit it by framing the site as NZ focussed.

The site is a lot like a forum, but focussed much more explicitly on the Q & A paradigm. Importantly though it has none of the cruft of your typical forum, instead replacing advanced management features with more social features…

• Obviously students can post questions, provide answers, rate answers, as well as comment on any question or answer. Users can also ‘watch’ certain threads to be alerted to updates. For moderation we are initially relying on user powered moderation features so we’ll see how that goes.
• Students each have a profile page, like this one (my test account). In addition to avatars, students can create as detailed a profile as they like.
• Borrowing from Twitter, users can ‘follow’ any other user. Because this isn’t a social network we decided against enabling more formal ‘friendship’ statuses…the point of following other users is to simply keep track of what your mates might be doing, or if you happen to find a user who really knows their stuff on a particular topic of interest. Of course users have visibility into who is following them.
• Borrowing from Facebook, users each have a ‘newsfeed’ style homepage for their account which displays all the activity of users they are following since their last session.
• Jumping on the widget bandwagon, users can copy/paste the code to display a flash widget on their own sites which will display their Schoolworking Avatar, Overall rating, and the number of questions/answers they’ve submitted.
• The widget is powered of course by XML feeds for each user. This XML feed also includes details of all the latest questions and answers that user has submitted…so you might even say this is a lite weight API. Certainly in future I intend to have apps for MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook.

I appreciate that my readership would otherwise have little interest in a site focussed on a student demographic so I don’t expect y’all to run out and sign up, but I would be very interested in any feedback you might have…particularly if you have ideas about how to float it in front of lots of students. Given it is a personal side project we are at this stage relying on search and word of mouth (which it has to be said seems to be the best source of referrals).

What next? Well, I’ve got a few ideas about other topics I would like to set up sites for, and we’ve set up the application for multi-language support which is another avenue I am interested in persuing. It’s just a matter of finding the time! It’s taken over a year so far, so no hurry I guess

We’ve also configured the application such that it could easily be deployed as a community blog style site…which basically means changing the labels from questions and answers to blog posts and comments, so perhaps there’s scope there too.