tech challenges, or, "Oops, that didn't work the way I wanted it to..."

So. I thought that I'd be cool and use a poll to see who wanted what for the tech challenge prizes. After all, I didn't really need to know who wanted what, I just needed to know how many of each prize I needed. So I set up a poll. The first poll site I used set up the poll in a form of javascript that made it impossible to embed into blogger. I couldn't put it in the layout, and I also couldn't put it in a post. They just wouldn't play nicely. So then I moved to another site. This one worked better, and I got the whole thing set up and posted. Then the problems began.

First, the poll used IP addresses to track votes, and make sure people didn't vote more than once. As a result, many of you who tried to vote at the library got a message that said you had already voted, instead of the poll itself. Once I figured that out, I knew to suggest voting at home so there would be a different IP address. I thought I had figured everything out.

Then today, while trying to get votes finalized and figure out exactly how many of each prize I needed, I realized that more people had voted "successfully" than the results were telling me. I went to add someone else's vote to the poll, and while the site told me that it had counted my vote, nothing new was showing up on my poll results. So apparently, the poll was telling some people that they had voted successfully when the exact opposite was true. (Not a lot, just enough that I had trouble figuring out whose votes had gone through and what blanks still needed to be filled.)

The result: I spent the evening filling in the blanks by contacting people the "old fashioned" way. By telephone. :)