Chicago Boyz Reader Survey
Posted by Jonathan on February 13th, 2006 (All posts by Jonathan)
Readers of this blog are invited to take a brief survey, available below in the extended-entry section of this post. Your participation requires only a few minutes and should help us to improve this blog. I’ll post the survey results as they become available. Many thanks for participating, and don’t forget to hit the “Submit Survey” button at the bottom of the survey frame when you are done.
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to the survey! I encourage anyone who has not responded to do so. The results look to be quite helpful.
UPDATE 2: In question 13 the option “Religion” appears twice. My mistake. The survey software doesn’t allow for corrections, so please ignore the second instance.
UPDATE 3: In case it isn’t obvious, please note that “Other” and some of the other options in the multiple-choice responses comes with text-entry boxes to allow you to enter additional information.
UPDATE 4: Still trying to figure out how to post the survey results. . .
UPDATE 5: Survey results as of Feb. 15, 2006 (survey is still running; feel free to take it if you haven’t yet).
February 13th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
nice survey
February 13th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Thanks. I am very interested to see what information it yields. I particularly hope that we can get the participation of many readers who don’t comment on posts.
February 13th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Was there a reason religion was mentioned multiple times under parts you are interested in?
February 13th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Dick,
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s a mistake. Sorry for any confusion it caused.
February 13th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
“Lex’s girly bands”.
As much as I hate to admit it, that was the reason I started coming here…
February 13th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Cap’n,
Right you are. And how could I have forgotten. Girly bands are a small price to pay to have you on board. I take it all back! Girly bands are great! Yes.
February 13th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Interesting survey. I’d like to see the results you get.
February 13th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Uh, dude, where the Hell is the link list to my girly bands? So, at some point Jonathan decided that this blog had to be serious and the Lex’s Music*l Links bar just … went away?
Dude. So wrong.
(Captain, new discoveries and re-discoveries: The Kowalskis, Thee Ultra Bimboos, The Ghetto Ways, The Dents, Nikki and the Corvettes, The Soviettes. My long time favorite Lisa Marr is making a live DVD, which should be cool. Muffs came to Chicago and … I was in DC on a trial. Then the Donnas had played at House of Blues Chicago, a five minute walk from work — and I found out the next day. Bitter fate.)
— the spam filter chokes on music*l, which is weird
February 13th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
cool survey!
February 13th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
Lex,
I removed the band link (and the other personal links) because I wanted more space for BlogAds and latest comments & c. But OK, I can take criticism — that’s why I get paid the big bucks. The survey results are telling me to revamp and restyle.
February 13th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Not one eentsy weentsy little box to click on under “links by topic”? Is space at that much of a premium?
Dude I hope the survey doesn’t make you turn it into a blog about hairdressing or making sure your phone and your toaster are matching shades of taupe or something. Maybe it would be better not to know … .
February 13th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
In good time. I need to redo the blogroll anyway.
Turns out that posting the results on the blog is more difficult than I anticipated. I may have to summarize them in a separate post.
February 14th, 2006 at 7:59 am
Hey Jonathan, could we each get a link to our own link lists? Updatable? That way we can get the weird stuff out there without you getting blamed for it. Things, you know, like Samurai Appliance Repair Man, a wild-eyed wrench-wielding libertarian.
February 14th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Mitch,
I will look into bringing that feature back to the blog’s home page. (Something like it is currently available next to the list of contributors on our authors page.)
February 14th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Hmmm, interesting survey. See, in my browser, there’s only one check circle for each question. So for example, it says, “Your sex”, and there’s one (unlabeled) space, evidently so we can admit to having at least one sex.
So, when you said you were hoping to get interesting information, I thought you were making a joke.
I had to view the page source to find the URL that led to the survey so I could see all of it. Dang, it’s just a survey.
February 14th, 2006 at 9:50 am
Angie,
What browser are you using?
February 14th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Interesting survey. However, it doesn’t work with Firefox 1.5.
February 14th, 2006 at 8:04 pm
Mishu,
I am also using Firefox 1.5 and I had no difficulty submitting a survey response a couple of minutes ago. What happens when you try to submit a response?
February 14th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
I can’t scroll to the bottom of the survey to submit my responses.
February 14th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
The choices for question 17 are cut off.
February 14th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
I changed the dimensions of the frame in which the survey appears. How does it look now? You should see 19 questions and a “Submit Survey” button at the bottom.
February 14th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
I couldn’t see the submit button before, but this new setup seems to have fixed it.
Great idea to find out what the readers think, and it’s bound to generate interesting results since there is always so much ground covered among all the contributors.
February 15th, 2006 at 2:47 am
If you can’t see the “submit” button, click inside the frame and hit the “end” key. That’ll scroll the survey frame down.
February 15th, 2006 at 7:30 am
Thanks, LotharBot!
February 16th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Jonathan — sorry, got busy yesterday and forgot to look for replies. (Toilet tank broke of its own free will! Water everywhere! Hate to think what would have happened if I hadn’t been home to shut off the water.)
I’m using Netscape 7.02. Old, I know, but so’s the computer. Now I see down to question 10, and after that it’s just a blank. But that happens on a lot of blogs. For some reason the browser will only display so much frame (in some cases, none).
OK now on Mozilla 1.7.12, Konqueror 3.4.2, Firefox 1.07 (on a new computer). Though on the latter the frame is really long at the end.
February 16th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Angie, sorry about the plumbing but thanks for the feedback. I don’t know what to tell you about the browsers. Some of the older ones don’t seem to handle inline frames well. (I lengthened the frame in response to comments above; that’s why it’s so long now.) I take it you were able to complete the survey from one of the computers you mentioned.
The survey software is the best of several free online packages that I looked at. It works great but everything goes through the vendor’s server, and the best way to offer a survey without forcing readers to go offsite is by putting everything in an i-frame. Tradeoffs.
March 8th, 2006 at 12:46 am
One additional “reader survey” comment:
A modification I’d like to see is that, instead of just saying “9 comments” or whatever for each entry, it should note who made the last comment and on what date/time. So, for example, here it would say “27 comments (last by LotharBot, 12:44 AM on 3/8/2006)” or something similar. This makes it easier to track activity, especially when there are one or two super-active threads like there have been over the past couple days.
March 8th, 2006 at 6:50 am
Thanks, LotharBot. I’ll add your suggestion to the list.