We have partnered with a company called AddToAny.com to add a cool sharing option to your polls. When you create a poll on PollDaddy.com now there is an option to enable sharing. (To see how this works hover over the “Share This” link in the poll below.) This is going to be available as a trial for a few weeks to see if users find it useful.

With AddToAny enabled in your poll, your voters will be able to share a link to the page on your site across WordPress, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, email and much more. This will help spread the word that you have a super cool poll going down and you need more votes! So what do you think? Is it a good addition?

As a new member of the PollDaddy team I’m pleased to announce that we’ve now added restrictions to surveys. This allows you to restrict access to a survey using a password, or to a chosen set of IP addresses. Both of these should make surveys more useful to people who don’t want the entire world and their dog taking part in their survey, and are ideal for group or internal company surveys.

For example, when restricting by password a visitor will see this:

Both options are available while editing a survey, as shown below.

Full details about how to use the new features can be found on the PollDaddy support page.

We are excited to announce today that PollDaddy Jr. is now available to users of Webs.com. This partnership will allow Webs.com users to create and manage their PollDaddy polls directly in their Webs.com site editor without the need to go to PollDaddy.com. If you use Webs.com you can access this new functionality by clicking on the ‘Addons’ button in the site editor. From there just choose polls on the left hand side and you will see our app.

Webs.com provide all the tools you need to create a professional-looking website in minutes. Add a blog, forum, calendar, photo gallery, video gallery and much more. You also have the ability to add members and create personal profiles so you can turn your site into a community where friends, colleagues and family can connect and collaborate. You can sign up for a free Webs.com account here to try it out.

If you would like any more information on PollDaddy Jr. and how it can super charge your own online community then please get in touch!

If you need to put a poll on your site but you are limited for space then you can check out our new micro style. It’s a super small poll and its available on PollDaddy.com, our WordPress Plugin and PollDaddy Jr. today. You can also load it into our new visual poll style editor to customize for yourself.

We have updated the visual style editor on PollDaddy to incorporate some of the features of our new style layouts. The visual style editor lets your create your own custom poll styles without needing to know any CSS. You can find this feature by clicking on the ‘polls’ drop-down menu at the top of your account and choosing ‘Custom Poll Styles’.

We have added the following new features…

Pre-load Existing Styles
When creating a new custom style, you can pre-load some of our existing styles. Aluminum, Plain white, Plain Black, Paper, Skull Light and Skull Dark can be pre-loaded into the editor for you to manipulate and save as your own.

Better Control Over Layout
New styles such as ‘answer group’ and ‘answer check’ give you much more control over positioning of answers, radio buttons and check boxes. Text can now also be aligned left, center or right.

Vote Button
Previously the editor always outputted the same grey vote button. Now you have full control over the appearance of the vote button. They even have a loading effect when you press them. The new buttons are fully compatible with the custom language pack.

Rounded Corners
Under the border control for most elements there is now a  border-radius option to give a rounded corner effect. This effect does not work with Internet Explorer, you can set it for users of Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera etc.

Links
All links in the poll such as ‘view results’, ‘return to poll’ and ‘view comments’ can be styled.

Result Bar
The result bars have a new height property to give more control over their appearance and any background image you might set for them.

All of these new features are also available on PollDaddy Jr. If you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion relating to this please let us know.

We have added a new option to the poll style and language pack editor – Update polls.

This option is available when you are editing a style or a language pack. It will allow you to update all the polls that currently use the style or the language pack that you have edited.

This option just makes it easier to implement changes across all your polls more quickly.

Any other shortcut recommendations/suggestions are welcome here

We have added some cool new features to how our polls are currently built on PollDaddy.com. There are 6 new poll styles and we have  made it a lot easier for designers to create more advanced custom styles.

With this new platform we will now be adding new styles on a more regular basis. All of this new content is available across PollDaddy.com, PollDaddy Jr., and our WordPress Plugin. For more information check out the list below.

• Vote Feedback
  Previously when someone voted on your poll there was a slight delay before the results came back. When someone votes now a loading wheel will replace the button to show that something is happening. This is controlled by the new CSS class “pds-vote-button-load”. This class will be applied to the vote button once it is pressed.
• 6 New Basic Styles
  There are now 6 new poll styles to choose from. There are 2 new basic styles: black and white. Paper, Aluminum and dark and light skull style.
• Adjustable Widths
  All basic polls styles are now available in wide (630px), medium (300px) and narrow (150px) widths so that the polls will fit in better with your blog posts, sidebars and profiles.
• New CSS classes for better layout
  We have added new CSS classes and some new span tags around a lot of the key elements on both the poll and results view. It is much easier now to accurately place answers beside radio buttons and adjust the result bars to different styles. A good example of the new style layouts can be found in the results text for each answer. Now the answer, percentage and number of votes can be divided out into separate elements and styled individually.
  

• Links images hide links etc.
  All links in the polls (view results, return to poll, and comments ) all have individual CSS class names attached meaning that they can be hidden or replaced with images.
• Available on…
  All of these new features are available on PollDaddy.com, PollDaddy Jr., and our WordPress plugin today.

If you need help with any of these new features, please feel free to get in touch.

We have updated the WordPress plugin to version 1.3.

If you are using WordPress.org, you can download the latest version here.
You can also read the latest support article on installing the plugin on a WordPress.org blog here.

Included in this update are new poll actions, open and close poll.
These actions, as the names suggest, allow you to…

Open a poll – the poll will accept votes.

Close a poll – a poll will not accept votes, also the poll title will say the poll is closed.

Also, if you have custom styles created on your PollDaddy site, you will now be given an option to select one of them when creating a poll.
When creating or editing a poll, just select the Custom Styles link under Design.

This will present you with a drop down menu of all your custom styles for you to choose from.

Use the Standard Styles link to be presented with the standard style templates again.

We intend to add more functionality to the plugin on a more regular basis so keep an eye on this blog for further updates.

We have added a new billing history page to the site.

You can access this page if you have a Pro/Pro2 account, by going to your account profile page. Here you will now see a ‘Billing History’ tab, click on this to be directed to the new billing history page.

This page shows you the following;

• All billing transactions to date
• Subscription Status
• Next billing date
• Cancellation link
• Invoice link
• Customer Reference Number

You will now be able to fully manage your subscription with PollDaddy from this page, from downloading past invoices to canceling a subscription.

If you have any questions about this page, please leave a comment or feedback here

Our rating widgets are now available directly in your WordPress.com dashboard. Look out for the “Ratings” option in your admin bar. You can see a full low down on how it all works over on the WordPress support site.

http://support.wordpress.com/ratings/

Also, check out this video for a demo of how to use this new feature.