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"Machie would like a php poll please"

I'm back! I hope you're all doing well. =)

It's time I finished my website! So if it's okay I'd like to post some questions in this thread and as always would greatly appreciate any help/input. ^^

To keep Hmmm happy and to not waste valuable knowledge, I'd like to repost any information that would be useful to other webmasters on Freeola.

I can't guarantee anything, but any help deemed extremely useful might win you a GAD. ;)

Completed Questions

none :(

New Questions

1) Using TITLE for links
We've all used ALT before for images but I've never used TITLE before for links. Should I be using them? I heard it helps search engines but you shouldn't really use it on every link. I notice Freeola doesn't use them.

2) Linking your own pages
I read on Digg the other day that search engines were going to get tough on duplicate content. It talked about how you do links on your sites and that search engines would see these URLs (see below) as different sites when obviously they are the same page.

http://www.freeola.com/chat/index.html
http://www.freeola.com/chat/
http://freeola.com/chat/

I noticed I've been doing this on my site. So how should I be doing my links? Also for my navigation I just use the even more simple URL.. "/chat/", "/forum/" etc, should I change them and use the full URL instead?

3) Switching to em
I decided to switch to em after all. Something about IE not letting pixel sizes resize which I suppose is a bit unfair to the user who'd like some control. I brought this up before but it seemed complicated.

At the moment I have font-size: 62.5%; for the body tag. Which is about 10px? So 1em is 10px and 1.2em is 12px. As 10px is too small I have to change the size in the other tags (h1, h2, p etc). So am I doing it right? Also I don't understand this bit about the heading tags wanting to be 12px. So 2em is 24px.

Another thing, the website said browser default text size is 12px (or was it 14? I forget) but for my FireFox it seems to be 16 (and normal size to me). So I'm a little worried using em and having less control might make my text look smaller on other peoples machines.

And finally if I use em, do I have to stop using px when I set margin and padding values? I notice some people use em to do this.

4) Keeping your CSS clean
I've been cleaning my CSS file lately and it looks less cluttered and easily manageable. My site is made up of several different areas and each one has many different css elements.

Obviously I don't want to put all of them into one CSS file so what would you suggest? I suppose I could have a different CSS file for each area of my site (content-area1.css, content-area2.css), or I could have a CSS file that imports the global setting CSS file and either of the area CSS files. How would I make one? Is it as simple as..

@import url('global-settings.css');
@import url('area1.css');

Actually, ignore the first option, it would involve me having to edit all CSS files just to change one global setting.

Is there nothing in the readme file that tells you how to embed it? Failing that, an <iframe>??

Yes that's true, there's no real way to stop people voting more than once.

Okay Xpoll installed very well, I was quite surprised. It's a little more advanced and has the odd feature I don't need. The only problem is I've no idea how I implement it to one of my pages.

Every poll I make ends up on this index page.

Sorry to hear that, fingers crossed for the second one though :)

I'm not sure there is a reliable way to prevent multi-voting for non-account users, as if it's cookie based, the cookie can be deleted, and if it's IP based, you may block other users who are issued that IP address, unless you block the IP address for x amount of minutes.

SitePoll looked pretty good and I got it working, but it displayed the results on the same page (below the poll) and just visiting the poll page made me vote for the top choice automatically. Also to have more than one poll I'd have to duplicate everything. Not sure how secure it is from stopping duplicate votes either. =(

I'll try Xpoll now.

Ah thank you very much cjh =) I'll give them both a try right now. Keep your fingers crossed for me. Oh and congratulations on your recent GAD win. ^^

How about SitePoll or X-Poll?

Why is that Garin? Oh I should say that I'd use the poll as a substitute for not having user comments. So no stupid polls about "what's your favourite Simpsons character?" but relevant polls accompanying articles so users can contribute in a way other than emailing me.

An example of this would be an article on infinite canvas webcomics, where I add my own views. I just thought it'd be nice to have a poll and let the user take part as well. I can see it being very beneficial to my site if I ever find something I can use.

Forget user interaction, they do nothing but criticise anyway :P
Not sure polls are of great use to a new site either.

Thank you for the script Hmmm, unfortunately I had some problems with it and it only lets me have one on my site so sadly I had to pass on it. =( Though I really appreciate you finding it and setting up a demo for me. Cheers for doing that.

I just tried to install 4 other poll scripts and each of them I couldn't get working. Not sure whether it was the script or because I didn't do something they probably expected me to do. With my zero knowledge in PHP and MySQL databases I'm afraid I'm very dependent on readme files.

I've also been looking at commercial polls and had trouble finding good ones that werent over $100. *pout*

I have two options now, forget user interaction and scrap all the polls and feedback or I could convince Freeola we need polls on the Forum and could I possibly have a copy of their script. =)

Machie wrote:
> ...do the results have bar graphs, I think they do but I
> couldn't get them to show on my screen.


Whoops - there are 'bars' which you can customise.
I had a typo which is why they weren't showing for you.

I've corrected it and used the admin system to bump up the figures to show them better: www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk/poll