Venturing into new territory… poll/survey software.

Granted, this isn’t the most "Web 2.0" stuff… but I’m learning about it. Today, I’m going to look specifically at the polling features. I took a quick peek a week or so ago, and found it pretty easy to set up a default poll – but some of the options were worded pretty strangely. I’m going to use this blog entry to demystify some of them.

First: Remember to look in the left-hand toolbar to figure out what to do next. I managed to create a new poll, but started scratching my head about what to do next. Left-hand bar "Guide" section has a link to "Create Questions".

Label Position: I had to read this a couple of times before I had it figured out. When making web pages, a ‘label’ might refer to a piece of text that goes along with a text field or something. In this case, things seem to be confused. The option is called "Label Position", but the options all refer to "button left", "button right", etc. The "button" in this case is the radio button (in the case of a multiple choice question). I want the radio button to appear to the left of the text (label?), so I chose "button left". (If you pick the position of the button, rather than that of the label, shouldn’t the option be called Button Position?)

Answer Rotation: I’m pretty sure this refers to randomizing the answers, so they don’t appear in the same order for every person taking the poll.

Help!: OK, so I just noticed the little green questionmark icon guy. It’s meant to give you some contextual help for whichever screen you happen to be on. You can probably disregard most of this post, since it’s probably all answered in The Emerald City.

May 26 Update: a few points that you may need to know

• Firefox/Roller Bug? – If you embed a poll in a Roller blog post, you won’t be able to edit the post in Firefox. You’ll need to use Internet Explorer. (Weird, I know…). I would actually recommend putting the poll in its own post, and put other next in a second post (so you can edit the text part on its own and not worry about it too much)
• IF YOU CAN’T GET THE POLL TO WORK: i.e. you embed the code, but you only see the last screen, it may mean that your poll has past the specified ‘end date’. By default, Opinio sets it as a week – be sure to set it to something appropriate for your project. After the fact This is can be changed by going to "Poll Home", and clicking on the "Stop Date" to change it. (See the next point for the next step.)
• Your poll may be locked – go to "Poll Home" if the traffic light is red, your poll is locked."Click to unlock poll". This will happen if your poll end date has passed – even after changing the date, you will have to unlock the poll in order to have people take it again. 

 Here is my sample poll: