Ask HN: Review my web app, thatPoll.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my web app, thatPoll.com

8 pointsdimarco7 comments

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.

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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?)

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.

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.

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 ...).

http://www.thatpoll.com

Nice design.

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

Ah, I tested as many different blogs as I could. Bummer about LiveJournal though.

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