Search Results for 'No Chumps at Chumpsoft' ↓

Today was time to knuckle down and get some work done. I am about 80% done moving an entire nested web site with connected database to a new server (this is going from a Linux running on a PC platform to our enterprise web server), and trying to get all the walls, roofs, and floors swapped without anyone even seeing a thing. The first step was moving all the databases from one mySQL server to another. It’s pretty easy to do dumps of the databases as a text file of SQL statements- I did it quickly in phpMyAdmin. Most of the ones less than 2 Mb then loaded easily into the new database server (also using phpMyAdmin) but the bigger ones (one is more than 6 Mb) had to be done command line. Not too bad. Created the new accounts on the new mySQl server. Changed my connection scripts on [...]

I’ve been very happy with our purchase of phpQuestionnaire, a PHP + mySQL set of scripts that have allowed us to easily create, admin, and export dat for online surveys. It’s been a champ, not a chump. Today I was doing a CSV (comma separated value) export for a recent survey, somthing I had yet to use. This was so I could put the data in Excel for a project manager at one of our coleges. I was disappointed to find that in the open response questions, any RETURN characters entered in the text area input fields was NOT stripped out on the CSV export. this cause major havoc, as on import to Excel, the RETURN indicates the end of a data row. As an end around, I resorted to a series of BBEdit search and replaces. The data first record was easy to spot as it was always a [...]

Okay, 14 readers took the time to try the goofy, meaningless survey I posted as a quick demo of using phpQuestionnaire. The survey is open, and I have set this one up so the results are publicly viewable: http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/phpq/stats.php?sid=3. What was nice was that I could tweak it in midstream based on the early feedbacks that said the font was too small and they did not like all the items being mandatory. I could have in one stroke flipped the formatting by setting a different template too. The results? Meaningless? Charming? 1/3 read the blog from the web site, and 2/3 read from RSS reader or Bloglines. Only one person knew the dog’s real name (no it is not “Biff” or “Alan”) but most folks knew my bike ride was about 10 miles. The best ones were responses to question 6:   If you were describing CogDogBlog to a colleague, [...]

In the last two years, we have home spun 4 or 5 online surveys for our projects. It took a bit of elbow grease in PHP and mySQL to get a decent system, and we were successful in creating a usable form for our survey-ees and a reporting tool. But this year, the demand was growing for doing more of these, and each iteration of a new type of survey was a big pile of custom changes to our code. It looked like time to buy a package that we could use to deploy web surveys more quickly. After some research, we purchased phpQuestionnaire from the humbly outfit named Chumpsoft. It pretty much matched our server environment, has a good set of question types, templates, saves data to mySQL as well as exports to other formats, for US$199. I already created a first survey that will be used by one [...]