Chicago Boyz Reader Survey

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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).

28 thoughts on “Chicago Boyz Reader Survey”

  2. 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.

  6. 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.

  8. 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

  10. 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.

  11. 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 … .

  12. 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.

  14. 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.)

  15. 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.

  18. 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?

  21. 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.

  22. 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.

  25. 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.

  26. 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.

  27. 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.

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