Archive - Aug 11, 2010
Adding Google Documents Forms to Tumblr
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/11/2010 - 22:04Recently, I was asked how to add a Google Document Form to Tumblr. I don’t do a lot of work in Tumblr, but I figured it would be fairly easy, depending on what you want to get done. So, here is what I did:
First, create a Google Document Form: Go to Google Documents. Click on Create New, and select Form. Create the questions you want for the form. Then, click on More Options, and Embed. This will give you some text you can copy and paste that looks something like this:
<iframe src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?formkey=SomeRandomFormKeyWithLotsOfNumbersAndLetters" width="760" height="625" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>
As best as I can tell, with my limited Tumblr experience, there are two things that you can do with this. One is that you can create a Custom Page in Tumblr with this. When you are logged into Tumblr, click on Customize. Then, click on Pages… Add a page. Give the page a URL and select a Custom Layout. Enter the html in the custom layout along with any other information you might want or need.
It is worth noting that when I tried using a standard layout and put in the html, it would change the html before returning to the wysiwyg editor. Another thing that I tried, which worked nicely was to add the html into the Info section for my tumblr page. When doing this, you might want to experiment with different widths and heights. In my case a width of 200 and a height of 350 worked nicely for my simple two question form.
Another thing you may want to do is add a link to the results. In my case, once I had created my form, I went back to the Google Docs main page that lists all my different documents. I selected the form I wanted and brought it up as a spreadsheet. Then, I clicked on the down arrow next to share, and selected Publish As A Website. With this, you can simply take a link which you can add to your custom page, or you can get HTML to embed in a page. This html looks pretty similar to the html for the form, and again, you might want to adjust the width and height.
To get a look at some of this, check My Tumblr Page in the lower right hand section, as well as the Test Google Docs page I created.
You could also use these methods to embed a Google Documents Form into your blogs or other websites. Are you doing anything interesting with Google Documents Forms?
Wordless Wednesday - Checking the Voting Machines
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/11/2010 - 09:40
Okay. A quick word. I watched the registrars and moderators secure the voting machines and ballots and print out the reports in Woodbridge, CT. I feel that it is very important to keep an eye on the vote counting process, even in a town like Woodbridge, where it is done extremely well.
What Does a U.S. Senate Seat Cost? - #ctsen
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/11/2010 - 09:04With 95% of the votes in, Linda McMahon has received 58,206 votes, or just under half of the Republican votes cast. Extrapolating things out, she’ll probably end up with just over 61,000 votes. Reports are that she has spent $26,000,000 on her campaign. That works out to be $425 per vote. In the 2006 U.S. Senate Race in Connecticut, there were over 1.1 million votes cast. If that number holds, McMahon is going to need something like 560,000 votes to win the general election. Assuming that Republican votes cost about the same as other votes, that would be around $240,000,000 to win the general election.
The Connecticut Democratic Party has a great video out about what could be done with the $50,000,000 that McMahon has been expected to spend on the U.S. Senate race. If she has to spend much more, it simply amplifies the Democratic message.
Meanwhile, other’s are playing on her background with the WWE, such as can be found in The Cynics Guide to Politics: Off the Top Rope. Others are pointing to another prescient Onion piece from 2001 predicting Vince McMahon's X-SPAN Promises Bone-Crunching Legislative Coverage.
The comments on Twitter have been fairly negative as well. The CT Senate “race now officially called ‘Fake Senate Race’ due to McMahon & Blumenthal having faked parts of their work”.
“McMahon wins in #CTSEN R primary. /// and then the Undertaker beat her up backstage”.
and “What does it say about American politics? Is it now officially as fake as WWE”.
Meanwhile, Blumenthal issued a press release congratulating his opponent
To all of tonight's winners, including my opponent, congratulations. There are clear choices ahead and a great deal at stake. Washington isn't working and the people of Connecticut want to know what we're going to do to stand up to the special interests and put their interests first. This is going to be a tough campaign, and I'm going to focus on what matters to the people of Connecticut.
Another opponent in the race, John Mertens gave a speech calling for a new way to re-engage the voters who have been disgusted with politics, and who have lost faith in our democracy.
In his speech he said,
A few weeks ago I attended an event during Social Web Week in New Haven. I met some amazing people, who are passionate about rebuilding our democracy, and our democratic process.
This was at the political free for all that I helped organize as part of Social Web Week. It was a great discussion with some great people there and I’m willing to help everyone make better use of the social web to rebuild our democracy. I hope Mertens, and for that matter Blumenthal, can use the social web to make this a real democratic process and not an entertainment show going to the highest bidder.
