Indablog

Officially, “The Launch” was last Wednesday, when I posted the announcement as Daily Kos diary. Feeling a strong affinity with that community, I was hoping for a much greater response. The dozen or so votes that came through were certainly better than nothing, but not enough to force a runoff among the official candidates. I had hoped for around 200.

Later that evening I announced the site on Red State, and the next day on Free Republic and the Pajama’s Media Roundtable. I got a few voters from that, but mostly some steady ballotstuffing from Ron Paul supporters. I don’t blame them, even if they’re only a few folks at the campaign headquarters with too much time on their hands. The ability to excluding repeat nuisance voters is ultimately a much less important indicator of success than getting people to participate from across the political spectrum. Anyway, with persistence, I’ll have the candidate attributes section working before long, and the legitiimate Paul supporters will be free to express as a group why they like him.

Undaunted (or not terribly so), I also created a quick poll on atheism versus belief, prompted by a debate televised last week on ABC News Nightline. That had nearly no response at all. But it proved that my candidate entry/nomination tool worked well enough to help me instantiate two new polls in a reasonable amount of time.

Even though the response was so disappointingly light, the experience was useful in that it turned up two bugs in the balloting/charting part of the system. One bug is already squashed: The system was too flexible, allowing ballots to be cast with no votes. The other is still a puzzle. One (at least one) voter got an empty confirmation message. He was confused by it and, fortunately for me, complained. It took a few exchanges back and forth to figure out the nature of his complaint. He wanted a votername. I wanted him to have a votername… He wanted to login. I wanted him to be able to login. He stuck with me long enough that I was able to determine what the broken link was, but I still don’t know what made it break. If anyone else experiences this problem, please let me know.

I’ve signed up for the Personal Democracy Forum and an associated side conference this weekend in NYC. I’ll have miss the Jammers competition at Jacksonville Beach this year, but I should arrive in time for the inaugaration of World Gitis Day. Plus, I’ll be getting into NY on Thursday in time for A*T!!

Filed under: Development Chronicles