Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey.   So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting.  As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system.  So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there.  And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.

The plugin is pretty simple and written clearly enough to make adjustments easy.  And most importantly it utilizes a table structure that is normalized, and well structured, which will work well for the eventual reporting needs.  I did do some hacking around in the code to change some of the default behavior — mostly just commenting out features we didn’t want.  These would lend themselves well to some additional options in the plug-in settings — maybe I’ll get around to adding those in at some point.  When it comes to the reports I’ll also go into the background, using PHPMyAdmin to grab the tables directly — again it wouldn’t take much to add more flexibility into the WordPress admin panel options for the plug-in, but I’m still running in the quick/simple mode here.  And with the help of the Plaintxt theme it is up and running.

The plugin could be quite useful for all sorts of user feedback on a site, not just surveys.  The nicely structured data collected in plugin-specific tables would make reporting really flexible.

WordPress › Surveys « WordPress Plugins

The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to you blog. You can let the vistors take surveys and see the result from the admin side.

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Learning something new is good for the brain and the hands.  L. Francis Herreshoff, the designer of some of the most beautiful man-made objects ever, wrote “there were among men a few, a very few, who used both their hands and their heads, and they achieved a happiness that nigh passeth the understanding.” (He was also a bit of a character).   So in learning something it is not simply enough to just read about it, you also should also strive to create something.  In A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan states an appreciation for “forms of knowledge that seem to yield most readily to the hands.”  He goes on to say “Different kinds of work, performed with different sets of tools, can disclose different faces of the world…”

So don’t be satisfied as a spectator — get your hands dirty.  Grow your own dinner – knit your own fisherman’s sweater — build a canoe and use it to transport the family on an exploration of a distant waterway.  Make something — Craft something — Grow something — try something you’re not sure you can actually accomplish.  Even if you fall short, you’ll be stretching a lot of muscles — both mental and physical — and the journey is more than half the fun.

Michael Pollan: “Food Rules”: A Completely Different Way To Fix The Health Care Crisis

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.  There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we’re eating them every day.

CTS – Collections

“Sailing is a wonderful and unique thing, and the sensation of being noiselessly and smoothly propelled without cost of fuel is one of the most satisfactory pleasures known, but when you add to this the fact that the sailboat itself is one of the most interesting things which God has let man make–well, then you get a combination which is almost sacred.”

Lewis Francis Herreshoff – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

His books include The Common Sense of Yacht Design, The Compleat Cruiser, Capt. Nat Herreshoff: The Wizard of Bristol, The Writings of L. Francis Herreshoff, Sensible Cruising Designs and An L. Francis Herreshoff Reader. He published numerous magazine articles, notably the ‘How To Build’ series in the magazine The Rudder.

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