Even though I only announced it last Thursday, my Timed Quiz Generator has already gained plenty of attention and interest!

The Generator Blog gets most of the credit for, well, generating most of the interest when they linked to the Timed Quiz Generator on Saturday. After that, it started appearing on other blogs, such as Geradores de Imagem and in Lynn Viehl's list of ten things that will cost you nothing. Thank you for the links, by the way.

Once word got out, then you started to see quizzes appear. Some of them are the type of topics you would expect, like this quiz on New Zealand's regions.

However, since the quizzes are simple to create and post, people have been creating quizzes tailored to their specific interests, as well. For example, one “bored attorney who spends too much time reading medblogs at work” created a quiz asking how many medblogs can you name in 2 minutes. That quiz was actually posted twice, once at that bottom of the page of that link, directly underneath a list of medblogs, but also a second time as an entirely separate blog.

The same poster who created the New Zealand region test above has also created several tests concerning role-playing characters he and other people have created. I won't link to those, as they wouldn't make any sense to anyone outside his group of associates. However, this is a good creative use of the Timed Quiz Generator. The quiz doesn't have to be some grandiose test of someone's geography, sports, or trivia knowledge. It can simply to be to have fun or challenge your friends and associates on things that have meaning to you and no one else.

As the use of the generator spreads, there are also some things we're learning about posting the quizzes. One quiz poster was having trouble running his quiz on MEGAONE's free hosting. Naturally, MEGAONE adds its own advertising code to the program, but their service inexplicably changes the line “window.onload = init;” (which sets up the initial quiz variables as soon as the page loads) to “window.freehomepages = init;”, which renders the quiz unusable on their service. The quizzes work fine on Angelfire, another ad-based free host, but due to their method of embedding, the quiz won't show up on all browsers. Safari 3, in particular, seems to have problems displaying Angelfire pages.

If you're having these problems, I suggest using a free hosting service without ads, such as Freehostia or AwardSpace. Another simpler idea is to do what medblog addict did and post it on a free blog service, such as Blogspot or WordPress.

Speaking of timed quizzes, I should mention that, since last Sunday, the number of timed quizzes in my How Many Xs Can You Name In Y Minutes post has blasted past the 500 mark, and is already well into the 600s! If you enjoy these types of quizzes, or are just looking for quiz idea inspiration, you'll want to check it out.