How To: Add a Poll to Your Journal Entry

Hi folks -- I did a poll last week about whether I should do a tutorial about how to add a poll to your Journal entry (which was one of the features added in R13).

The "Sure, do a tutorial" votes won, but to be honest, I was going to do one regardless of the poll results. So here it is. It's pretty straightforward:

1. Create a new entry or edit an existing one.

2. Click the "Add Poll" button in the button bar or the formatting toolbar. (If you've already got stuff in your blog entry, click with your mouse in your entry where you want the poll to go, then click the Add Poll button.):

Both Add Poll buttons do the same thing.

3. Give your poll a name (it doesn't show up anywhere). Enter your poll topic. Then, enter your poll choices. If you want to add more choices, click the "+" sign. To remove choices, click the "-" sign:

4. If you want to preview your poll, click the "Preview" button, which will show you the poll and a sample results page. When you're done with the Preview, click the "close" button to go back to poll editing:

5. When you're finished making your poll, click the "Create" button. The poll will be added into your Journal entry. That's pretty much it:

You can continue editing your Journal entry, just like you would any entry.

(Now, what's happening behind the scenes is that it's creating an AOL Poll which lives on the AOL Poll site. It also creates an iFRAME, which is like a window cut into your Journal so it can show the poll that's on the AOL Polls site.

This all happens in the background, so you don't need to know any of the HTML that makes it work, though you can see it if you switch to HTML mode and take a look -- you probably shouldn't mess with it unless you know what you're doing.)

Tip: I usually like to center things -- until we get alignment buttons, I use div tags:

<div align="center">Stuff to be centered</div>

Right now, you can't edit polls you've created, or fiddle vote counts, change layouts, etc. And I don't know what future poll enhancements are planned. So it's pretty much for quick-and-easy, single-question, multiple-answer polls.

Also please note that polls are currently only working for US Journalers, though Paul and others have noted that you can create a poll in a US Journal and copy-and-paste it into a non-US Journal, and it should work.

 (Keep in mind -- there are other third-party poll providers out there, so if you find one you want added to the AOL Journals whitelist, let us know.)

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, aol polls, how to, tutorial, journals poll