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Ask HN: Review my web app, thatPoll.com

8 points by dimarco ↗ HN
I've been wanting to learn RoR(or any framework outside of php/flex), so I picked something to actually build.

http://www.thatpoll.com

It's a quick and easy site to create and answer polls/questions. The main use I see for it is in blogs, where you can easily embed the poll into a blog.<p>I rarely comment on somebody's blog, but I read a ton of them and I figure the majority of people do something similar. With a 1-click answer poll, you can still get some sort of feedback from your audience.

Here is an example of one of my polls in tumblr & blogger:

http://markdimarco.blogspot.com/ http://icepack.tumblr.com/

I'd love some feedback on it.

I'm rubbish at web design, but I've been hearing "Release early and Release often" a lot lately, so here's to that.

8 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 33.1 ms ] thread
JacobAldridge
Good concept, and very simple to use (which I believe is more important than web design, at least in the early stages).

Not having a website, I can't test the usability. I imagine you might encounter some resistance to inserting the look & feel of your polls onto the look & feel of their site, but you're serving a niche seeking a quick & dirty poll tool and I think this does the trick very nicely.

The public / private poll was also an excellent thought.

Edit: Created a poll - http://thatpoll.com/questions/14 - and I like how readily it shows which polls you've answered, and how.

Is there a way to see the results of polls you haven't answered (say, aren't qualified to but are interested in?)

dimarco
JacobAldridge, thanks! Regarding the look & feel vs. a persons blog - That's a good point. I've only really played around with thatPoll on black & white sites(I'm a bit of a minimalist). A minimal theme'ing mechanism will be in the works.

There isn't a way to see all new polls yet. With a history system, that should definitely be an option though.

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AndrewDucker
Nice design.

Sadly, not usable on Livejournal, because that doesn't allow iframes (for security reasons).

dimarco
Ah, I tested as many different blogs as I could. Bummer about LiveJournal though.
NoBSWebDesign
That looks like an excellent idea and very well executed. I really liked that it literally only took 1 click to vote (as opposed to usual where you have to click the radio input, and then click a submit button).

I have two suggestions for it:

1. Make it an embeddable javascript widget instead of an iframe. I think it would be more universally acceptable, and anyone could then simply use CSS to stylize the poll however they please.

2. I don't know if you do this already or not, but maybe track IP addresses of those who vote and geocode them onto a map or something. Comments usually have names to go along with them, it would be nice to have some sort of vague automatic identification to go along with the votes.

dimarco
I noticed that Disqus uses a JS widget to embed comments. I like that approach a lot. I wasn't sure of all of the benefits, but full CSS styling is pretty nice.

As a way to get bloggers to adopt it, I think I'm going to make custom CSS skins on a blog by blog basis and start posting links to a new relevant poll that I made in the comment section.

You don't think that would annoy people, would you?

Hopefully a few bloggers will start embedding the poll into the bottom of their post.

Geocoding IPs would be really cool to combine with a map. I'm set up to do that now, I just need to collect more data.

It'd be even cooler to be able to find polls that a similar user base has answered and statistically analyze a certain poll(85% of the people that agreed with your blog also agreed with ...).