#8 The First Best Album Brackets Newsletter Poll! Please vote!
Hey folks! Ready to look at surveys a.k.a. polls here on Buttondown?
So, if I did everything right, at the bottom you will see a survey that states, “Should the Best Album Tournaments abandon the current pattern (2000, 1989, 2001, 1988, etc.) for determining the year of the next tournament and find a new method?” with options for Yes (i.e. find a new method) or No (i.e. keep the pattern going).
(If I didn’t do everything right, you’ll see a bit of code and it’s back to the drawing board for me.)
This is not a binding survey. It’s just practice for when we might need to use it for real. Far as I can tell, as I’m writing this, there’s no way to give it a timed expiration date. If true, that puts a big damper on using it for the tournament, but it’s possible I haven’t looked deep enough into the function. (In fact, I know I haven’t.)
In case you’re wondering, making surveys/polls on Buttondown is odd, not unappealing. There’s three tabs in the control panel, one for Subscribers, for Surveys, and for Emails. Subscribers is just a list of subscribers with administrative options. Emails is where the actual posts are written, edited and posted. But then there’s a Surveys tab. All the surveys are created separately from the emails, live separately and are managed separately from them, and are posted into the email through a bit of code. The main consequence of this that I can see, at this point, is that surveys can be re-used in different posts. So maybe a possibility is that a single match is run for more than one day (because the combined reach I have from this newsletter + Bluesky still doesn’t compete with what I had with Twitter), and I send out a new post for each day of the match, re-using the survey code, until I end the survey from the Surveys tab. Look at me, 52 years old and still learning, every day.
(Also: because you subscribe to this newsletter doesn’t necessarily mean you follow me on Bluesky. Bluesky is now free for all, and a free for all, and you can find me right here.)
But that’s getting a little bit ahead of myself. For now, let’s practice having surveys. If you’re reading this, please select an answer, even if you don’t really care about the choices. If you don’t see a survey here, and just a bit of code, or even nothing at all, please keep checking, I should have it fixed ASAP.