A couple days ago we implemented a slightly different look and feel for Scriptovia.com. We decided to make things a bit lighter and cleaner than the old design. Now it’s time for you to tell us what you think. Do you like the new look and feel or should we go back to the old one?

See before and after screens below:

Before:

After:

Calling all hackers and passionate people. Scriptovia is currently looking for a web developer who can make a long term commitment to help Scriptovia become the number one online education portal out there. Since we are still a small team, you will play a key role in the development of our websites and will be able to call Scriptovia.com your own. You will participate in directing the creative and technical strategy of Scriptovia moving forward and your impact will be potentially felt by millions of people around the world. Don’t worry too much about which languages you know, we are more interested in your passion and motivation. You can check out our jobs page here for a better description of our needs. If you are interested, send me an email to aseem@scriptovia.com.

Ok this is totally unrelated to Scriptovia but I had to comment. It seems that The Times is reporting that Yahoo and News Corp may agree to a deal in which News Corp receives 25% of Yahoo in exchange for MySpace. As of right now, Yahoo’s market cap. is 37.13 Billion dollars. So MySpace is worth 9.3 billion dollars? I don’t know about you but the last time I logged into MySpace most of my comments were ads and 80% of the current bulletins were ads. In my opinion, MySpace is way past its prime. I can’t bring myself to believe that Yahoo would even consider this deal, but if this news is real then my advice for Yahoo is to get into bed with Mark Zuckerburg!

It looks like we just got a review on KillerStartups.com. You can check it out here. Make sure to vote for us and leave a comment about how you think we will do. I have also added their widget to the sidebar of this blog so you can stay updated on how we are doing. Thanks to the people at KillerStartups.com who wrote the review!

We have fixed the rendering problems that the site was having when viewing in Internet Explorer 6. As of yesterday the site has been thoroughly tested specifically in IE6 and there should be any major rendering problems specific to IE6, if there is let me know. My apologies for the inconvenience.

It has been a very busy week! On Tuesday we made our official BETA launch announcement. We got some good press coverage in the Seattle Post Intelligencer (thanks to John Cook for the great article!), the University of Washington Daily, and some other smaller outlets. We have also been working on bugs and finalizing some of the BETA technology.

Right now our highest priority bug is a rendering problem with the site when using Internet Explorer 6. If you visit the website using IE6, the right hand column will fall to the bottom of the page on the home page and My Portfolio page. Approximately 40 percent of our user base is accessing Scriptovia.com using IE6, so we are working as fast as we can to fix this bug. For those of you that are using Internet Explorer 6, I deeply apologize for the inconvenience and I promise to update you via this blog when the problem is fixed.

Other than the bugs, we are working on putting the finishing touches on the document conversion technology that will convert your documents into a format that you can view within your internet browser.

Please continue to send me feedback and bugs. I can be contacted through email, by phone, or you can leave a comment on this post for all to see.

As of a couple hours ago, the limited BETA of Scriptovia has been released. The reason I say “limited” BETA is because all of the BETA features are not yet available. These features including document viewing within the browser, rankings and awards, and badges will be available within the next couple of weeks.

I also can’t stress enough that this is still a work in progress. If you decide to use the site right now you might find many bugs, but most of them have a workaround. Please email me at aseem@scriptovia.com if you find any critical bugs. The reason we decided to release the site with so much missing functionality is because we want to make sure students can use the core components of Scriptovia before the end of the school year.

The data from ThinkEssay (essays, members, and comments) has not yet been migrated into the Scriptovia database. If you are a current member of ThinkEssay, I urge you to wait a couple of days until we get the data migrated before signing up for Scriptovia. This way you can just use your ThinkEssay account with all your old documents and settings.

Let us know what you think and bear with us while we work out the bugs!

Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately, we have been hard at work trying to get the site out the door.

FYI: we have changed the blog URL from blog.scriptovia.com to www.scriptoviablog.com; please change your RSS feeds and bookmarks.

So when can you expect to see the site? Well I can’t promise a date but we are on the home stretch of things. We are working out a few critical bugs and will launch a limited BETA version of the site as soon as the kinks are ironed out. Depending on how quick we work through these problems, we could have something live by the end of the week or three weeks from now. Unfortunately it is hard to tell how much time it will take to work out the bugs since the problems can seem relatively straight-forward on the service but are really deep and dirty bugs. It is just the nature of web development. Anyways I promise to keep you posted and I will try to get more posts on the blog.

ThinkEssay.com is basically the proof-of-concept for Scriptovia. Developed in early 2005, it aims to allow students to learn from each other’s essays in an online community atmosphere. The idea was to create a feature limited website with no marketing budget to see how users would interact with the concept. What we ended up with was a relatively active and excited community. Today ThinkEssay has over 5,100 members and 400 essays.

What have we learned from ThinkEssay?
Well so far we have not received any complaints from teachers or have heard of anybody using the website for plagiarism. Instead we have found that students are appreciative of the service and are excited to use it. See some of the comments below from real ThinkEssay members:

“Very informative, was able to use a few of these to springboard my own essay about the same topic. Great work!”
-giddyupzil
“This site has amazing potential. Im definitely going 2 refer all my friends”
-aussie-boy
“Thanks to the writer of this essay. It really helped clear up some of the questions I had about the book.”
-Chris

Along with the favorable feedback and comments from students, we received some kudos from third parties as well. In 2006, ThinkEssay was an Official Honoree of the famous Webby Awards.

What’s different about Scriptovia?
Scriptovia will be different from ThinkEssay in two ways. 1) Scriptovia will have a larger scope, instead of focusing only on essays we are focusing on all schoolwork, including lab reports, notes, vocabulary lists, study guides, presentations etc. 2) Scriptovia will have a more comprehensive feature set. ThinkEssay basically had three features: you could upload an essay, read an essay, and comment on an essay. Scriptovia will have many more features. Look for posts beginning with “feature” for more information on individual features.

What is going to happen to ThinkEssay?
After we launch Scriptovia into BETA ThinkEssay will no longer exist. When you go to www.thinkessay.com you will automatically be redirected to Scriptovia.com. All the essays on ThinkEssay will automatically be transferred to Scriptovia. Anybody that has a ThinkEssay membership will automatically have a Scriptovia membership with their respective essays already uploaded to Scriptovia. Just login to Scriptovia with your ThinkEssay username and password!

Find out more about the Webby Awards here: How the Webbys Work

Sorry for the delay in getting a post up on the blog. My computer decided to die on Tuesday morning and I just got things up and running. Thanks to Computer Stop and Computer & Applications in Bellevue for your help in getting my computer running in a timely matter with limited data loss.

Ok now down to business. In my “What is Scriptovia?” post I ended by saying I would post use cases that described to people how exactly Scriptovia could be used. This first post is on finding motivation to do schoolwork. For a lot of students writing an essay or doing a project is a big task. One of the biggest battles in getting that task done is getting started. I don’t know how many times I sat in front of a blank Word document at 11:30pm watching that little black cursor flash on and off, most of the time I just couldn’t figure out how to get started. Working in an isolated environment without the help of my peers or support from others in my situation made it even harder. All I needed was a little motivation from others who had done what I am about to do in order to get the ball rolling.

Scriptovia allows students to view other students’ schoolwork to find this motivation. After looking at the work of somebody else who was in a similar position, it is a lot easier to get started yourself. Say you are writing your first admissions essay for a university that you would like to attend. Having never written an admissions essay before the task seems a little daunting, but if you are able to look at other students admissions essays it becomes a bit easier to get started.

This concept has many other applications. When I was at Microsoft and was tasked with completing a functional specification, the first thing I would do is get on the intranet and take a look at other groups’ functional specs in order to get started. If you are planning on going bungee jumping or sky diving, you will most likely do it with a friend because you can offer each other motivation to take that leap of faith. Scriptovia takes this concept to the educational space where this type of support system doesn’t yet exist on a wide scale.