My first project upon returning to theRedSpace offices after a Christmas and New Year vacation was to build an application for Comedy Central so that they could easily build and deploy quizzes to Facebook. Specifically, these quizzes would be of the personality ilk. For example, what character from a particular television show are you, or who is your best match in this category type of quizzes.
A producer will load the program on their desktop, fill out the information for the quiz, including questions, possible results, styles, Facebook information and more. When a producer fills in information about styles, images, and anything else that could possibly be shown, it is loaded up on screen for them right then and there, so that they don’t need to worry about having a color off or an incorrect link to an image. There are also step-by-step instructions on the screen so that the producer can easily set up the Facebook application (as that cannot yet be automated).
Once a producer has finished entering all of the information about the quiz, they simply click a button and the program will generate a PHP file that makes use of Facebook’s FBML language. This file is automatically uploded to the Comedy Central servers and displays a link that the producer can copy and paste into the “Canvas Callback URL” section in the Facebook application settings. Once they have entered this, the quiz is live and can be taken by anyone. Quizzes can also be submitted to the application directory for people to find.
Producers can also set up a timer, to allow quiz takers to see the next time the show will be on, as well as set up links under the main quiz header to the show’s homepage, videos from the show, it’s Facebook fan page, and really anything else they might want to link to.
The quiz that is generated will also allow users to invite their friends to take the quiz and will give quiz takers the ability to post their results to their Facebook wall.
The application was built using the Adobe AIR platform. I used AIR because only a select group of Comedy Central producers would be using the Quiz Generator, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to take advantage of the AIR framework.
