Poll software?

October 20, 2005 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

I was all set to post a new poll when I discovered the plugin I’m using in WordPress (“Democracy“) only allows one poll at any time, and I want to keep my “Rate my site” poll up for now. (It’s in the right sidebar – please vote if you haven’t already done so.)

I used PollHost.com for the “Will you visit this blog again?” poll but I wasn’t very impressed with the buggy HTML code that site generated.

So where next? Basically all I need is a site where I can create polls for free and which produces valid HTML/XHTML. A quick Google search turns up a lot of options, but I’ll try out FreePolls.com and Easy-Poll.com first.

Oh dear – FreePolls is the first to fail; their conditions include “you agree to display banner ads and occasional pop-up ads on all your polls” – er, no! Adverts inside the poll – well, that’s the price of “free” polls – but pop-ups? No way!

The only downside of Easy-Polls that I can see (so far) is the number of poll answers is limited to 20, but I can’t really see that as a problem.

OK, so I’ve entered the info and it’s given me some fairly ugly code; will it work? (Ah, I’ve got WordPress set to fix up any obvious HTML errors in posts, so it’s changed the ugly code from mixed case to all lower case … I wonder if it changed anything else?)

Here’s the new poll; looks OK, doesn’t it? I’ll probably use Easy-Polls.com again, and next time I might mess around with the colours.

Guess who spoke too soon! When I tried to vote, I got this error:

Database error: Invalid SQL: SELECT * FROM polls WHERE poll_id=
MySQL Error: 1064 (You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ” at line 1)
Session halted.

The “poll_id” looks to be set correctly in the form. Time to trawl through their code and see if I can spot the error.