48 Hours without Mishap

It's 2 nights ago now since I sent out the notices to all my lists and made links to QuestGarden from webquest.sdsu.edu and webquest.org and opened things up to anyone interested. Things seem to be holding up nicely. The QuestGarden page got over 700 hits since the doors opened. Yesterday, 57 people created WebQuests, and today another 31. Almost all of them are empty and untitled and came into existence only because people were getting acquainted with the tool. But already there are three WebQuests that are almost complete. It's clear that they were pasted in from existing quests, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Zafer Unal, creator of the Instant WebQuest site, kindly took the time to work his way through QuestGarden and uncovered a couple of places where I'd left myself open to security breaches. They're now fixed, and I hope he'll continue to provide that kind of advice.

It's cosmic the way some things cycle back to a new version of an older event. In 1982 I set up an electronic bulletin board on a spare Apple ][ in our lab at SDSU. As far as I can tell it was among the first 2 or three BBSs set up specifically for teachers to communicate with each other. After testing it by calling it up repeatedly myself (you had to ... gasp ... dial up a phone number to get to it), I spread the word that it was up and ready. The very first person to call was Al Rogers, who would later skyrocket to fame as Mr. FrEdWriter and then Mr. FrEdMail.

So it didn't amaze me at all that the first person to hit QuestGarden after I threw the switch Thursday night was again Al Rogers.