You Choose beta release
If you look on the sidebar of the homepage you may notice a shiny new blue box with a question in it. You Choose the answer to that question.
Yes, it’s a poll.
It is my latest pet project. Some of you may have noticed the abundant “ghost options” appearing in my other poll, powered by idioPoll. I was getting tired of this bug, so I decided to write a poll script myself when I got the time. Compared to a blog or a guestbook, a poll isn’t as hard. It certainly took less time overall to code. The project posed some challenges on its own—figuring out how to store and relate the data was a bit of a poser. Overall though, I‘m rather proud of what I’ve accomplished.
If you haven’t voted yet, take a moment to check out my favourite jQuerified feature: those of you with JavaScript enabled can click the “Results” button and instantly see the results before voting.
Those of you without JavaScript must suffer through a page reload. Anyway, go ahead and vote—and then you have to wait 24 hours before you can vote again! In that poll, at least. Maybe if I can think of some more poll questions I’ll switch it from one poll to a randomly selected poll. Yes, with You Choose, you can display a random poll!
Why “You Choose”? Well, I had a difficult time coming up with a name, as some of you might recall. Eventually I decided that “___ Poll” was too generic. I wanted something a bit more original than that. So this sort of popped into my head. In hindsight it sounds like I’m ripping off YouTube but … meh. You can’t win ’em all. You can barely break even.
This is all part of my valiant and somewhat vain campaign to rescue my site from the laws of thermodynamics.
I’ve also changed the links section to randomly choose 10 links from a table, so that way you get a little refreshment (plus it’s easier for me to maintain). Next I have to fix up some design issues and whatnot.
You Choose is still in beta. I rushed it to completion because I was anxious to have it up and running on this site. Even so, if you want to tinker, feel free to download it and try it out.