Screencast: Making a Quick Poll
April 6th, 2007
Out of sure curiosity I wanted to take a stab at making a screencast, like some others have. I also have been wanting to add a polling system to my other site gonecksgo.com. So why not combine the two.
This screencast runs through the basics of setting up some database tables to hold the questions, answer options, and response totals. It is geared towards integration with WordPress or any other system that uses ezSQL — of course it would be easy enough to use this guideline without ezSQL, you’ll just need to do some additional coding.
Using PHP I go through pulling the questions from the database, getting the related answer options for those questions, and recording the results from visitors voting. For this iteration the poll is very unsecure and lends itself to being gamed quite easily but with a time of roughly 30 minutes I decided to cover that in the next screencast.
I hope you all enjoy watching it. I’d love to hear any and all feedback, questions, or condemnations.
Watch the movie (104MB) online or download it (52MB) and watch later.
April 6th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Not bad, but I would have preferred voice over instruction to music.
What software are you using for the screencast? and how did you set up textmate to auto-complete div’s with ending comments?
April 7th, 2007 at 6:48 am
I’ll have to look into doing narration for the next one.
For the screencast I use iShowU, it’s many times better than SnapzPro and it’s not such a resource hog when it’s running. As for the auto-complete div’s with ending comments I just set up a couple custom snippets. I’ll post a quick howto when I get back from the gym.
May 5th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
iShowU is definitely the way to do it when your on the Mac. Works like a champ. And whenever I need to convert it to another format, I use VisualHub (which also happens to beat the pants off the Flash Video tool when it comes to process time as well).
May 5th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
VisualHub is pretty nice. I’ve played around with some of the early 1.x versions and it worked really well. My only problem with it, at least the versions I demo’d, is that it’s written in Applescript (at least I’m pretty sure it is), meaning that some issues with Applescript programs unexpectedly quitting affect this program and take some searching to figure out (I ran into it a couple times but it’s been a while).
May 21st, 2007 at 9:38 am
I enjoyed it, Mike. It’s a little beyond my ltd sql knowledge, but watching stuff like this is usually how i see something as ‘not so daunting’, though i’m pretty sure it still is. You can’t fool me.
At any rate, i really enjoyed it, and 28 seconds later to mars, too. ;)
Yes, voiceover would be good. …with echo and reverb! Or perhaps do a helium induced munchkin voice. That would cool.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:56 am
I like the helium induced munchkin voice idea. I’ll definitely have to give that one a test drive next go round.
Next time I’ll definitely fool you about how easy SQL is to deal with Luke. Then I want to see you actually write some. *cue maniacal laughter*
September 15th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
When did this happen? Dude, what are your priorities? Parks,? Partyin’? Culture? What????