T w e n t y S i d e d

Earlier in the week I ran a poll to see what kind of content people enjoyed / were looking forFrom me. I didn’t put Rutskarn into the poll, because I know better than to rate my work against his Battlespire series, which is basically a work of real-world heroism. here on the blog. Although, the real, actual purpose of the post was to mess around with polling data. In the process, I found yet another polling platform that didn’t work. Strawpoll seemed pretty functional, at the cost of being unforgivably ugly and oversized.

In the end I went with Google Forms. That worked really well. Google even automatically attaches the poll to a spreadsheet of results, which updates in realtime. Some people pointed out that it’s trivial to vote again and again. That’s easy to fix, although it would mean you’d need a Google account to participate. I wonder what percentage of people have Google accounts? I suppose if I wanted to find out I could run a poll and make sure you couldn’t vote more than once, but… oh.

So anyway. The results…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “More Content: Poll Results”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This poll has two purposes. The first is run a poll to answer a question. I’ve asked this question before, but “state your preference in the comments” makes for muddled and difficult-to interpret results.

The second is to test out this polling platform. I’ve messed with lots of plugins and widgets for running polls, and they were all varying flavors of broken. Maybe it takes the user away from my site when they vote so it can shower them with ads and skeevy download links. Maybe the embed code is so complicated it confuses WordPress. Maybe it has some annoying limit to the number of answers, or it allows instant no-effort ballot stuffingAll polls are susceptible to ballot stuffing in a world of proxy servers, but at the very least, users should have to go to some sort of trouble to do it.. Maybe it requires a WordPress plugin that’s hasn’t been updated in 3 years and is many WordPress versions out of date. Or it wants me to create a premium account to see the results. It’s hilarious to me that we live in a world where it’s effortless to embed 1080p video on a webpage for free, but a simple text-based poll is apparently too much to ask.

Anyway. I’m trying out a new site. We’ll see how it goes:

Of course, my work is driven more by my passions than public opinion, so this poll probably won’t change my output. But I do get curious about this sort of thing from time to time.

Also, I can confirm that our Fallout 4 series is going to conclude in the next block of episodes. After that? The next game is already chosen. I’ll give you a hint: It’s a PS4 exclusive from a developer that’s really, really large.

EDIT:

And that poll is broken for some people. It’s unreliable and sometimes requires multiple refreshes to load. (Well, the ADVERTISEMENT part always loads. Of course.)

So let’s try a Google form:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “More Content”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This Friday, Josh and I (and maybe a few other people) will be streaming Civilization 6. I don’t know if he’s going to play multiplayer, or just a straight game against the AI, but I’ll be there to comment and heckle as needed.

Just a reminder that Josh is the one that enjoys PvP and playing against Godlike AI, while I’m more of a “put the game on easy and stomp the AI” kind of player. As I improve at the game, rather than facing off against more difficult AI, I try to beat the same AI by increasingly larger amounts. I dunno. It works for me. Don’t judge.

At any rate, you’ll get to see the latest Civ game and listen to at least two very different perspectives on the series.

The stream is this Friday, October 21st, at 6pm Eastern time. There’s a timer below to count down to the event. Hope to see you there.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.