We can’t tell if the cats like it or hate it, but they certainly have some sort of opinion.

They come running into the room whenever anyone plays, which I suppose is some sort of sign that they might actually enjoy it.

We locked ourselves in our office this weekend and did some work wrapping up our new messaging platform.

You can now send a message to any other Student of Fortune user, even if you aren’t making or responding to a clarification. This makes it a whole lot easier to get help with homework questions and chat with someone before buying a homework solution. Check it out and let us know if you like it!

Oh, almost forgot. We did some neat little UI cleanups here and there. A special prize to the first person who spots an improvement!

Here’s a heartfelt congratulations to Neo, who has earned the vast majority of his $1,758.39 profits to date from the repeated sales of his A-1 Photography Project solution. Needless to say, it’s amazing how posting just one solution (in a few different places) can provide such a huge return.

If you’re a student looking to earn money by answering homework questions, there’s no better way than using Student of Fortune. Good luck, and happy bounty hunting!

“b_h,” the amazing pontificator from Johns Hopkins, has earned over $2,700 answering homework questions on Student of Fortune. Go b_h!

What might not be so obvious, though, is how well someone can do by referring their friends and site visitors to Student of Fortune. That’s because Student of Fortune will pay you 5% of whatever your friends and referrals spend on Student of Fortune - forever!

Even better - we offer exclusive school based links like ucla.studentoffortune.com for those who really want to promote the site. You’ll earn 5% of those referrals, too.

So sign up today at http://www.studentoffortune.com. Then mosey on over to our affiliate program page to learn about our programs.

Student of Fortune has a whopping 473 categories in which to post a question. That’s pretty daunting.

What’s even more daunting, though, is searching for your question on our site and not getting the answer you were looking for. That sucks.

Ever hear the statement that an assembly is greater than the sum of its parts? Well, it’s true. Let’s say you’re searching for Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, because that’s the homework you’ve got. I don’t have any idea what Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is, but we don’t have any questions that mention it.

We used to just say the equivalent of “no results, no dice, please play again.” That’s pretty crummy though. So, through the power of microcomputing, we are now able to offer category suggestions for every search query that doesn’t return results. Searching for Chlamydomonas reinhardtii now comes up with:

Search for Questions… hmm. Nothing.

Maybe you’re asking about Plant Study, Generics and Reproductive Biology, General Biology, or something else? Post your question right now and you’ll get a great answer, super fast!

Much better. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is definitely a botany term.

How accurate is it? Let’s try some random article titles from Wikipedia:

• Thebit (crater) -> “The Solar System”
• Tuesday Warner -> “Music for Film and Theater”, “Mass Media” (”Tuesday Warner is a fictional character on the TVNZ soap opera Shortland Street”)
• Clara Fraser -> “American Policy,” “Women in History,” “Feminist Thought”

Not bad! It’s a strange technique and not easily recounted in a blog post, but perhaps we’ll cover it at BarCampLA 4.

What happens when your CFO gets drunk and plops down your entire advertising budget for the week on a stock photography site? Just kidding.

We’ve added all sorts of new features to the site, some obvious (KITTIES!) and some less so:

• Cleaner UI: OMG KITTIES! Yes, we have more kitty pictures on the site. We also cleaned up the CSS and HTML across the site. I think you’ll agree that the site looks a lot friendlier and cleaner.
• Solution Attachment Previews: We now show previews of image and text attachments so you have a better chance of knowing whether or not you’ll like the solution.

Coming soon: Google Checkout and a magical-tagical category suggester. Don’t know what that last one is? Hold your breath - we’ll release it very very soon.

Thanks again for your support! Add a comment if there’s something else you’d like to see.

We’ll be attending Twiistup 2.0 this week in Venice, CA. Hope to see you there!

When most people wake up with a hangover, it’s because they drank too much. Over here at Student of Fortune, we roll a little differently. Yes, we wake up with hangover after all-day/night coding binge sessions. And, hey, we woke up with something beautiful this time!

Let me break this down…

• User Pictures: OMG PONIES! Yes, you can now attach a user picture to your Student of Fortune account, and we’ll plaster pretty much anything with your smug mug (or whatever else you upload). Why? Because that’s what you do when you’re Web 2.0.1b, that’s why.


• User Profiles: You know what our users ask for the most? Well, besides our ♥ phone numbers ♥, we get a lot of requests for the ability to create an extended user profiles. I guess people like talking about their cats or something. Well, paint me pink and call me Shirley (don’t call me Shirley) because we’ve created just the profile tool for you. Yes, now you can write a million (well, 4,000) characters about yourself and we’ll tell all the world. Huzzah!


• New Look: How many graphic designers does it take to come up with a better look? I don’t know either, but what I do know is how much we ♥ CSS for making sweeping and drastic changes to our look easier. And hey, nine out of ten dyslexic kittens agree, the new look is much much better! (Does anyone actually read this?) We also implemented MooTools, which is sort of like butter, but cooler and less fattening.


• Various Usability Improvements: Once in a while you’ll look at a friend and realize that something just looks better about them, but you just can’t place it. Well, that’s pretty much what we did this weekend - all sorts of fixes that you’ll never notice but make a difference anyway. It’s like adding organic peanuts to ice-cream sundaes… subtle difference, but oh so delicious.


• Distributed File System: I don’t really know what this is, but I’m told that it is supposed to make everything better. And I like making things better, don’t you?


• Even more AJAX: Remember when you were a kid and your mom used AJAX™ to make the kitchen look better? Well, apparently we used a whole bunch on our site, because it’s apparently what all those web2.0 people are doing (besides tagging stuff on flickr).

We’ve released some neat updates to the site today, including:

• A new and improved homepage for logged-in users
• Various usability changes across the site
• A new tool that allows you to change the price of a solution before it is purchsaed