Exercise Your Liberties!

Apparently this week is just Announcements on the Blog Week. Every time John looks at the log and sees more than two posts a day, he starts yelling.

But this announcement is important anyway! As most of you have noticed, Blogger's built-in polls have been a royal mess lately; losing or eating votes, resetting at random moments, and generally doing a piss-poor job of actually giving us a good picture of what people are voting on. We've been looking for a good replacement for a while and haven't come up with one that we really love, but it's getting to the point where we wonder why we even bother with the Blogger ones. And if you think seeing your votes is annoying, imagine being the person (me) in the guts of the thing trying to figure out what it's stupid problem is.

So, anyway, we're going to try a new polling software for a bit. It's got a couple of major drawbacks, so we'll tell you about them up front: the first is that voting takes you to the poll's page, which is minorly annoying (although nothing a back button on your browser can't fix in under a second). The second is that that page sometimes has a popup ad, which we are very sorry about but which most computers theoretically ought to block for you automatically. The third is that you won't have the neat little bars on the blog itself telling you how the poll's progressing - you'll have to actually click on the View button to check out what others have voted for.

But it also has good things. The most important is that it is stable as bedrock - there won't be randomly disappearing votes or shifting numbers all the time, and that's the most important thing, because those are useless and we hate anybody feeling like their voice isn't being heard. It's also nice that it's a lot harder to cheat than the Blogger polls were, thus allowing John's rage at the internet to sink to a safer, less coronary-like level, and that it's a lot easier for me to tinker with behind the scenes. We'd like to find something in the future that does all of the above at once (without, you know, costing a zillion dollars), but until then, we're giving this a test run.

So come test with us! Your old votes on the Blogger polls are gone, but to be honest Blogger was eating them like a hungry man at an hors d'oevres table and we had no idea if any of them were accurate anymore. We apologize if you have to vote again, but invite you to do so anyway. Vote. For science. For mythology. For the joy of clicking buttons.

No goddamn technology is going to keep us down. Take that!