Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
II
Adding Polls
In the beginning of this chapter, we compared a blog to a tree with a trunk, branches, and orna-
ments. Ratings and polls are among the brightest and shiniest ornaments around. They're also
among the most controversial.
Why? The underlying question, which also comes up when you're writing, titling, and publicizing
your blog posts, is: How far should you go to get attention for your blog?
Polls and ratings each have their problems. We're all accustomed to polls being presented along
with qualifying descriptions as to their accuracy. If you pay close attention to published polls, you'll
have seen that sometimes polls are misrepresented as being more, well, representative than they
really are.
Political campaigns have even created push polling, in which the point is not really to gather infor-
mation, but to put unsettling allegations into the heads of the people you're supposedly polling.
A typical push polling question goes something like this: “If you were to be told that (our oppo-
nent) was a lying, thieving creep—who picks out all the red M&Ms for himself every time he passes
a bowlful, not even leaving us even one—would all this make you: (1) very, very, unlikely to vote
for him; (2) very unlikely to vote for him; (3) not sure.” The results are then reported as: “Large
numbers of those polled are very unlikely to vote for our opponent (and leave us some red M&Ms,
darn you).”
So polls on websites get a hard time. Let's all agree, going in, that a blog poll is not representative.
It's just for fun! People want to know how other people who visited the site and bothered to vote—
so, not “the average citizen”—voted on a question. And, in a more positive version of push polling,
you can create fun or funny questions that are even more entertaining than the results you get.
Seen in this light, polls on your site are a lot of fun. If you can get enough visitors, and make the
poll interesting enough that it gets a reasonable number of votes, it can also be a valued addition to
your blog.
Creating and editing polls are very similar; creating a poll
tells you just about everything you need to know about edit-
ing one. The overall process for creating and editing polls is
also very similar to creating and editing blog posts, though
the details are different.
Here, we only describe creating a poll in detail; for editing,
we'll count on what you learn in creating a poll, plus your
knowledge of editing other WordPress items such as posts, as
described in Chapter 2, “Starting Your Blog Right.”
Follow these steps to add a poll to your site:
note
Fully integrated polling is a rela-
tively recent addition to WordPress,
thanks to Automattic purchasing
PollDaddy in October 2008.
Supporting polls on a site is quite
tricky; each poll requires the cre-
ation of a database to store the
information in the poll and the
responses, and displaying the lat-
est poll results to users requires a
query to that database. In the past,
you had to create an account and
even pay to have polls on your site.
Since October 2008, and hopefully
for many years to come, it's all
integrated and free.
1.
In the Administration area, under the Polls menu in the
left column, click Add New.
The Create Poll page appears, as shown in Figure 7.5.
Note that the heading also includes a link to List Polls,
which is actually where you not only see a list of polls, but
can edit them as well.
