Indablog

By Friday night I was playing with skins on the blog and had figured out how to get a raw RSS listing to display via PHP. It was getting late, and we were hungry so I left the raw stuff up there and went out to dinner. (I should probably get around to installing Apache on my laptop so that I can test locally.)

Today I’ll add the code for looping through the RSS array and making it readable. That doesn’t mean making the page look nice, though. Aesthetics are for later.

Spent most of yesterday examining traditional online polling technologies… ones that lack IRV capabilities. There are lots of scripts out there, with varying degrees of utility (mostly in Perl, it seems). OpinionRepublic, PollDaddy and Zvoters i intrigued me a little.

PollDaddy was just solid and simple. It won a comparative review here.

Zvoters is built with PHP and MYSQL, and promises an AJAX goody, but it’s still quite beta. The author has big ambition (and a nice sense of color), but he seems more focused on administration and installation rather than polling itself.

OpinionRepublic appears to be a social experiment gone stale. Some mystery person, claiming to be a professional market researcher who works for high-end corporations, asserts faith in “the immense power of public opnion.” The system is designed so that people can create polls and the selections within polls, with the assumption that popular opnions will “float to the top.” A noble goal, but not very well executed. OpinionRepublic has become a dumping ground for Viagra ads. Note to self: Make sure that my blog is set up to block comment spam.

I was especially interested in the poll tool at Free Republic. It makes a smart distinction between registered and unregistered participants. I’ll probably have to ask someone there how they did it.

Filed under: Development Chronicles