Start End
Headshot of me with long hair, pink lip stick, light makeup Kara Babcock

You Choose beta release

Published .

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. :arr: 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. :D 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.