Our old site for our support documents was a little hard to use. We have now cleaned it up and refreshed the current documents there to make them easier to navigate and read. It is still a little light on content but we will be working to add new pages every month to make it quicker to find answers to your questions about PollDaddy.
Go take a look and let us know what you think: http://support.polldaddy.com
A number of users have complained in the past that accessing options on the ‘List Polls’ and ‘List Surveys’ pages was difficult. We used to use the ‘Options’ drop down menu (pictured on the right).
Today when you log into your account you will notice that we have changed the layout of these links (pictured below). Now when you hover over one of your polls, surveys or ratings, a menu with all available options will appear underneath it. This should make it easier to access these features and remove one mouse click from the process.
PollDaddy is proud to be providing the voting mechanism for the inaugural TechCrunch Europe Awards. Almost 100 different companies, entrepreneurs, and investors have been nominated for awards in 14 different categories. You can vote online in all of these categories over the next week. Voting closes on the 2nd of July next week. If you are interested in European start ups then head on over for a look!
Award categories
The Europas: Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA)
The Europas: Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old)
The Europas: Best Social Innovation (which benefits society, EMEA)
The Europas: Best Enterprise / B2B Startup (EMEA)
The Europas: Best Cleantech / Environmental Startup (EMEA)
The Europas: Best European / Real World Gadget (EMEA)
The Europas: Best Entertainment Application or Service (EMEA)
The Europas: Best Mobile Startup (EMEA)
The Europas: Best Mobile Application (EMEA)
The Europas: Best Startup Founder(s)
The Europas: Best Investor (VC or Angel fund, EMEA)
We have updated the WordPress plugin to version 1.2
This version has fixed the last two remaining known bugs. The first bug was very tricky to locate as it was specific to the user’s hosts contraints.
Basically, when the plugin is installed, it requires you to login to retrieve an API key from PollDaddy. This key allows the plugin to communicate with PollDaddy. The request for the key uses SSL, however we found out that some hosts block SSL requests… so the plugin never retrieves an API key and thus, does not work for some users. We have now included an option to make a normal http request in this case.
The other bug was minor. After you logged in, the page would not redirect to the polls list… we have added a fix to correct this.
As far as we are aware, this release will resolve all known issues and from now on, we plan to keep adding more functionality to the plugin.
If you have any feedback about this plugin, please leave feedback here or use our feedback form.
doneWe have been playing around with a new rating widget for the past few weeks here at PollDaddy HQ and we reckon its time to give it a public showing. Before I continue, this is very much a beta feature and there will be the inevitable few bugs cropping up so its not just ready for prime time yet. When you log into your PollDaddy account you should see a new option in the account menu for ‘Ratings’. Here you can create a couple of different types of rating widgets as shown below…
You can create a star rating…
and you can also create a nero style rating…
As with all of our widgets, the ratings will be fully customizable to suit your needs. You can find a full low down on how all of this is going to work over on…
http://support.polldaddy.com/2009/07/01/rating-widgets/
We really need your help in making this a useful tool so please send any comments, suggestions or bugs to our support folks.
Lenny
PollDaddy.com
We have updated the site to allow you to enter a UTC offset or timezone in your account profile settings. This offset will now be applied to all the dates across the site, including the reports. Most importantly, this offset will allow you to localize all these dates relative to your timezone.
The reason we choose to change to UTC timezones rather than use standard GMT timezones, was because we found it more rigid and issues with DST cropped up. We choose a simpler offset for now but we’re pretty sure it will meet everyone’s requirements.
On the account profile page, you will now find a UTC setting, with an up/down counter to allow you to enter your UTC offset. As you click the up/down buttons, the local time relative to the current UTC offset will be displayed.. when this matches your local time, then you have the correct offset. You can set this value to any valid UTC offset and the dates in the poll/survey reports will reflect the new dates relative to this UTC timezone.
If you have any questions on this or anything else, please leave feedback in the comments or on our feedback page and we’ll get back to you.
We have added a new and frequently requested feature to the survey palette. This feature allows you to subscribe to email notifications for new survey responses.
Just enter an email address where you want the emails to be sent to, click the button to enable notifications and you are all set. An email will then be sent with every new response to your survey.
This can be handy to access a surveys progress and is more secure than subscribing to the RSS feed. Each email will give you the full response to the survey questions as well as the time the response was submitted and the location of the the respondent.
Keep your feature requests/suggestions coming, as we intend to add what we can as soon as we can and of course we always appreciate feedback..
The new custom tags feature will allow you append as many tags to the survey url as you like. This means you can add an identifier, perhaps unique to you, like an email address, customer id, department etc. Then when the survey is filled out, the identifier will be associated with this response and will be visible in the survey reports.
For instance take a look at a standard survey URL below…
http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/HE12EE2348B420D27/
If I had a survey recipient that I wanted to identify or tag with the following…
name – John Smith
customerID- 22343
Your new survey link going out to that person would look like…
http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/HE12EE2348B420D27/?email=John_Smith&dept=22343
The extra tags at the end of the link will then be saved along with that response. You can use this feature to track as much data as you want. For more information check out our help section.
For the next 2 weeks, team PollDaddy will be on the road for WordCamp SF 2009. Both Eoin and I will be on hand during WordCamp to answer any questions you have about using PollDaddy on WordPress and elsewhere. If you are passionate about blogging or developing for WordPress, PollDaddy, Intense Debate, BuddyPress etc. then why not come along?
“WordCamp San Francisco is a conference organized by the creators of WordPress for our users and developers. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.” via wordcamp.org
The speaker line up is super impressive: Matt Cutts, Tim Ferriss, Philip Greenspun, Dave Gray, Douglas Hanna, Tara Hunt, Cali Lewis, John Lilly, Dave Moyer, Matt Mullenweg, Andy Peatling, Chris Pirillo, Scott Porad and Steve Souders. What a line up! All of this in one day for just $25. There are still some places left if you would like to come along.
The Webware 100 2009 winners have just been announced. This year over 630,000 people voted for their favorite web apps. For the past 2 years PollDaddy has proudly powered the voting system behind this competition. We were also a winner back on 2007.
Big congrats to all of the winners this year, and thank you to Rafe and all of the team at CNET for working with us on this.
