Thursday, September 17, 2009

update 2009 #13

Data, new pols
Ing. Mhd. Hashem Taufiqui , Petro Koçi , Ilir Meta , Belgische politieke partijen , Laura Chinchilla Miranda , Jaroslav Foldyna , Roman Šmucler , Jaromír Drábek , Fritz Kuhn , Tarek Al-Wazir , Friedrich Merz , Erika Steinbach , Christian Wulff , Dieter Althaus , Ilse Aigner , Piratenpartei Deutschland , Jens Seipenbusch , Jürgen Trittin , Renate Künast , Andreas Popp , Peter Ramsauer , Gerda Hasselfeldt , Günther Oettinger , Klaus Wowereit , Matthias Platzeck , Jens Böhrnsen , Roland Koch , Ole von Beust , Erwin Sellering , Kurt Beck , Peter Müller , Jürgen Rüttgers , Stanislaw Tillich , Wolfgang Böhmer , Peter Harry Carstensen , Andrea Ypsilanti , Die Republikaner , Rolf Schlierer , Internet Censorship Controversy , Homosexual marriage , Health care system , Michael Melchior , Renovación Nacional (Perù) , Béla Bugár , Piratpartiet , Rickard Falkvinge ,

System , new functionality
- help page, to shortly guide users through the site
- users directory, to access users and their profiles
- improved routines for detection of spam or other inappropriate activity
- started to publish information about users and IP address which were banned or blacklisted for exceeding limits of rational activity

We are not alone on the way of new thinking

National politics is discredited. The wrong people are in power. The whole system is broken. But through technology we can all fight back. Andreas Whittam Smith, The revolution by text.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

update 2009 #12

Our sorry for longer delay in the blog updates. I was busy for the site development and optimization. Following is the improvement from the last 3 months:

- Further optimization of SQL queries (every single query was reviewed)
- Further optimization of database structure
- Further on-page SEO optimization
- Started working on off-page SEO optimization
- Created Twitter support, posting news to few Twitter accounts
- ElectionsMeter sitemap survey of polls
- Support User to user communication
- User profiles were extended for user’s Facebook, Twitter account, blog url and short info about the user’s mission
- Display of user notice boards
- Spread Nofollow attribute on links where desired
- Users can now vote on users opinions
- Users can include own links in polls and vote about the links. User’s links display snapshot of the linked site.
- Some javascript and ajax was used to make polls more user friendly and interactive
- User’s are now fully supported to edit and delete their own entries
- Launched users statistics to decently display users activity
- Other statistics support for last 10 entries on the site and top 10 entries on the site
- Added automatic control of users trying abuse site voting limits
- Improved automatic control detecting external programmed scripts and voting robots
- Embedded PHPBB forum was updated and SEO optimized
- Social linking service was extended and optimized to better reflect country specific linking sites
- Added functionality to invite friends, to send an email with the particular poll data.
- Polls display little more information in their analytics section. Newly every poll indicates user name (or IP address if not logged in) of the last voter voting in the poll.
- and many more updates ..

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Site optimization

Already planned (some improvements already done) and also in reflection to recent heavy traffic on the site we did some site optimization:
- cache setup
- etags setup
- CDN setup (temporal)
- CSS and Javascript compression
- Pictures compression optimization
- CSS sprites
- MySQL queries and indexes
- conditional layout display

Having all above improvements implemented we were lucky to reduce size of site code by half, loading speed for several seconds and responsiveness of database queries number of times.

The site should be now enough optimized to process traffic of 6 thousand voting users per hour.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Users attack poll "Creationism vs. Evolution"

Professor at the University of Minnesota, PZ Mayers posted on June 4, 2009 link to ElectionsMeter poll "Creationism vs. Evolution" on Pharyngula (Scienceblogs). He very likely wanted his readers to have a little fun while voting in this particular “pointless” poll. Readers then encouraged themselves to beat the poll to give lesson to all creationists. They came and hit the site with sudden high traffic so the site was overloaded. Within 24 hours 10 thousand users hit the poll (pike 3000 users per hour). To be honest we failed in this test of site performance. The site was very slow responding and even unavailable to some users so we decided immediately to review site code for better performance.

The same poll link appeared also on Bannination site. Where someone posted discussion about Evolution “Proof that Creationists are really juvenile. Do you love Jesus or Darwin?“ and linked the poll.

It was pretty good exercise for us. For the first time we could experience really huge bunch of users using the site, voting and commenting. The only thing we could finally regret after such attack of users (I am sorry to say, fascist of unified opinion) the result of the poll is not very representative. Wow! This is part of democracy. The poll was not abused in any way but simply and perfectly reflects will of the users. A problem however exists with type of users (users of unified opinion). The poll simply and drastically misses users of the other opinion. We as the site providers cannot be asked to adjust the poll result according to any reason, we can only encourage rest of the population to express its vote. The big question is only are there any Creationist, do they know about the poll, do they have interest to join the poll, does the general population ever have interest to vote in poll, if then what the general population be voting for, are only fascists interested in voting?

Will further users balance the result?

Monday, May 18, 2009

update 2009 #11

Data :
(1) new pols
Přijetí měny EURO v České republice, Gerald Häfner, Treaty of Lisbon, Lisabonská smlouva, Junge Liberale Österreich, Alev Korun

System :(1) new functionality
- simple sitemap, all polls and best bookmarks
- simple links survey, index of extenal links
- features of system mananagement and maintenance were extended
- links service by Addtoany was implemented to footer of every page (available to registered uses)
- RSS connections by Addtoany were implemented to RSS page

(2) improvements
- design of front page was simplified
- little update of Metadatas
- attempt of login will return erorr message if user's internet browser has cookies disabled or accidentaly deleted

Saturday, May 2, 2009

update 2009 #10

Data :
(1) new pols
Josef Bucher,Accession of Turkey to the European Union,Nová strana

System :
(1) new functionality
- join our newly opened discussion forum
- users may choose from predefined customised layouts (full, standart, light), the option is available at the bottom of every page
- users can quickly swith and surf through pages they visited at ElectionsMeter, surfing history is displayed at the bottom of every page

(2) improvements
- unsuccessful login procedure was secured by captcha
- arrow signals of a poll direction change were corrected
- important links at bottom ribbon received icons
- poll page upper right corner of links was updated
- script calculating poll graphs was optimised
- sign-in emails were updated and extended

Thursday, April 16, 2009

update 2009 #9

Data :
(1) new pols
Corneliu Vadim Tudor,Alegeri prezidenţiale în România,Principesa Margareta a României,Radu Duda,Crin Antonescu,Béla Markó,Mircea Geoană,Theodor Stolojan,Emil Boc,Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu,Traian Băsescu,UDMR / RMDSz,PNŢ-CD,Partidul Naţional Liberal,Partidul Conservator,Partidul Social Democrat,Partidul Democrat-Liberal,Jan Fischer,Centre démocrate humaniste,Socialistische Partij Anders,Parti Socialiste (Belgium),Vlaams Belang,Mouvement réformateur,Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie,Christen-Democratisch en Vlaams,Beatrix der Nederlanden,André Rouvoet,Wolfgang Schäuble,Ursula von der Leyen,Paul van Buitenen,Mark Rutte,Wouter Bos,Jan Peter Balkenende,Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Dem,Socialistische Partij,Partij van de Arbeid,Christen Democratisch Appèl,Han Seung-soo,Lee Myung-bak,Jayu Seonjin-dang,Minju-dang,Arnold Schwarzenegger,Hannara-dang

System :
(1) new functionality
- RSS, we reviewed and significantly exteded RSS functionality of the site, now the ElectionsMeter headlines can be easily delivered to your RSS readers, you can choose among regions of your interest, daily updates of significant moves and weeekly surveys of newly added polls
- new users with first votes get a window informing them about further functionality of the site
- icons, (widgets) now can display an arrow signal of a poll direction change
- warning messages and user dialogs were put to more userfriedly style

(2) improvements
- we spent our effort in last days on the code validation, the site is now HTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 valid! the site is however still under development so we will process this effort soon againg
- the code was also reviewed the way to care for the site be always properly displayed and well functioning in Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, IE8), Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.6
- graphs, histograms of poll results were recoded to more properly display the results
- icons, (widgets) were extended by javascript solution
- we improved the site defence against some rude robots
- some improvements were done in METADATAs

Thursday, April 2, 2009

update 2009 #8

Data :
(1) new pols
Kim Yong-il,Kim Jong-il,Kim Il-sung,Workers Party of Korea,Chondoist Chongu Party,DRFR,Jean-Marie Dedecker,Marianne Thyssen,Yves Leterme,Herman Van Rompuy,Albert II de Belgique,Boutros Boutros-Ghali,Ahmed Aboul Gheit,Ahmed Nazif,Muhammad Hosni Mubarak,Nasserist Party,Party Hizb al Tagammu,New Wafd Party,NDP (Egypt),Jaromír Štětina,Milan Hamerský,Jana Hybášková,Vladimír Železný,Benjamin Kuras,Věra Flasarová,David Macek,Jaromír Kohlíček,Jiří Maštálka,Vladimír Remek,Miloslav Ransdorf,Jaroslav Lobkowicz,Marie Jílková,Ondřej Benešík,Milan Horáček,Jiřina Šiklová,Přemysl Rabas,Jan Dusík,Zuzana Brzobohatá,Libor Rouček,Richard Falbr,Ivo Strejček,Milan Cabrnoch,Evžen Tošenovský,Oldřich Vlasák,Jan Zahradil,Pavel Jajtner,Zuzana Roithová,EU volby 2009,Ban Ki-moon,Euthanasia,OPEC,BRIC,ASEAN,The United Nations,International Monetary Fund,G20 major economies,2009 m. Lietuvos Prezidento rinkimai,Zigmas Vaišvila,Algirdas Pilvelis,Algimantas Matulevičius,Algirdas Butkevičius,Loreta Graužinienė,Valentinas Mazuronis,Dalia Grybauskaitė,Iranian presidential election 2009,Reza Pahlavi,Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi,Hassan Rowhani,Abdollah Nouri,Mohsen Mehralizadeh,Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf,Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel,Mir-Hossein Mousavi,Mehdi Karroubi,Elecciones presidenciales de El Salvador de 2009,Rodrigo Ávila,Mauricio Funes,Elecciones presidenciales de Chile de 2009,Hernán Büchi,Jiří Havel,Evelyn Matthei,Pablo Longueira,Martin Říman,Adolfo Zaldívar,José Miguel Insulza,Nicolás Eyzaguirre,Soledad Alvear,Afghan presidential election 2009,Sayed Jalal,Zalmay Khalilzad,Ramazan Bashardost,Anwar ul-Haq Ahady,Gul Agha Sherzai,Ali Ahmad Jalali,Ashraf Ghani,Dr. Abdullah Abdullah,Macedonian presidential election 2009,Agron Buxhaku,Mirushe Hoxha,Imer Selmani,Prezidentské voľby 2009 na Slovensku,Dagmara Bollová,Milan Melnik,Zuzana Martináková,Iveta Radičová

Saturday, March 28, 2009

update 2009 #7

Data :
(1) new pols
- Egypt : Party Hizb al Tagammu, New Wafd Party, NDP (Egypt)
- global : Ban Ki-moon, Euthanasia, OPEC, BRIC, ASEAN, The United Nations, International Monetary Fund, G20 major economies

System :
(1) new functionality
- in every poll is displayed histogram of election results from last 90 days, graph is showing development of votes for/against the politician
- domain ElectionsMeter.org was acquired and redirected to ElectionsMeter.com
- domain ElectionMeter.com (the term in singular number) was acquired for "strategic reasons", currently the domain offers overal view of all politicians and politics polls in the World
- hosting services were split between Hostmonster and Justhost
- Spanish 1politico.es and Chinese portal 1politician.cn were kicked off
- at the 1st-politician portals (1stpolitician.com, 1politician.eu, 1politician.cn, 1politiker.de, 1politik.ru, 1politik.cz) a buble appears with portrait and short description of the politician when a user moves mouse over the name
- the 1st-politician portals now counts and display politicians League (like in fotball the first League contains popular players and second League simply is occupied by a bit less popular and important players, data are based on voting results)

(2) improvements
- javasript routine to add/edit arguments now supports user preselected languages
- a routine controlling adding opinions in the poll was recoded
- search routine was added to 404page
- search routine was improved to let user search in predefined language version, whole ElectionsMeter or whole Google
- design of the 1st-politician portals was unified
- Robots.txt was updated and Sitemap was optimised

Thursday, March 19, 2009

update 2009 #6

I am sorry for almost one month delay.
Data:
some new polls from Switzerland, Uzbekistan, Libya, Italy, NewZealand: Bürgerlich-Demokratische Partei, European Union parties, Muhammad Salih, Anvar Juraboev, Gulnora Karimova, Baxtiyor Rahimov, Ergash Shoismatov, Sanjar Umarov, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Oʻzbekiston siyosiy partiyalari, Adolat, Milliy tiklanish, Fidokorlar, OXDP, O'zlidep, Muhammad Qaddafi, Saif al-Islam Muammar, Mussa Kussa, Abu-Bakr al-Mansouri, Baghdadi Mahmudi, Imbarek Shamekh, Brinda Karat, Francesco Storace, Partiti politici italiani, Jim Anderton, Peter Dunne, Rodney Hide, PitaSharples, Tariana Turia, Russel Norman, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Phil Goff

System:
(1) new functionality
- learned from Wikipedia, syntax of URL address was changed to be userfriendly and easy to read, now we even support national alphabet in URL address, see Cyrillic in this example http://ru.electionsmeter.com/голосования/vladimir-putin
- learned from Wikipedia, whole web was split into number of 3rd level domains to reflect individual supported languages, English remains the basic electionsmeter.com, others languages as an example Russian are supported now on ru.electionsmeter.com
- index page now shows last 10 votes with portrait of the politicians
- index page portraits of TOP politicians are zoomed when a user mouse over
- index page TOP10 rows are highlighted when a user moves mouse over and then a buble with portrait with short description appears
- index page now has a special option to dispaly TOP moves within last 7 days
- new user is switched to preselected region of his/her interest and to appropriate language version (if such is supported)
- index page TOP10 shows arrow indication of the recent move of the popularity
- current number of given votes and number of registered polls is now displayed on title page (as of today we recorded 31274 votes in 1525 polls)

(2) improvements
- METADATA were updated to reflect more the content of the every webpage
- special METADATA were arranged the way to better reflect unsupported languages
- the html code was rewieved for proper coding of H1, H2, H3 tags and alt names
- buttons were unified and now get highlighted when a user moves mouse over it
- menu seen at the top of every page was rearanged
- login functionality was moved out from index page, now remains only at Login page

Saturday, February 21, 2009

update 2009 #5

Data:
(1) new politicians
- in Czech republic: Vlastimil Tlustý
- in Denmark: Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Margrethe II
- in Norway: Jens Stoltenberg, Harald V
(2) new parties
- in Denmark: Socialdemokraterne, Venstre
- in Norway: Fremskrittspartiet, Det norske arbeiderparti, Høyre
(3) new events
- in Gergia: Should Georgia enter NATO?
- global: NATO

System:
(1) new functionality
- creation of Icons was extended to offer a simpler version of off-line Icon, one which generates just a static portrait and the URL address, this is useful when users cannot directly manage HTML code on their websites and blogs
- news ticker was placed at the top of poll page to show the latest voting of users
(2) improvements
- some minor improvements on title and poll page

Facebook II.

Join our groups on Facebook and become friend of our team.
John Elliott is our English moderator, Martina Maier is German moderator, Nika Martens is Russian moderator, Karel Suk is Czech moderator. Feel free to join us, extend the group of our friends, ask any questions you might have about ElectionsMeter. We are welcome and happy of the contact.



Let the idea of online democracy growths, support us!

Saturday, February 14, 2009

ElectionsMeter on Facebook

ElectionsMeter joined Facebook.
- join our group US politics
- join our group EU politics
- join our group Russian politics
- join our group German politics
- join our group Czech politics
We will work on furthter development. Join us and stay tuned.

update 2009 #4

Data:
(1) new politicians
- in Germany: Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Armin Grein, Gabriele Pauli
- in Switzerland: Bernhard Hess, Eva Lichtenberger, Ulrike Lunacek, Andreas Mölzer, Johannes Voggenhuber, Ewald Stadler
- in the Czech republic: Vlastimil Tlustý, Richard Sequens
- in Portugal: Aníbal Cavaco Silva, Carlos Coelho, Fernando Teixeira dos Santos, Francisco Louçã, Jerónimo de Sousa, João de Deus Pinheiro, José Sócrates, Luís Amado, Luís Queiró, Manuela Ferreira Leite, Mário Soares, Paulo Portas
(2) new parties
- in the Czech republic: Strana pro otevřenou společnost, Volba pro kraj (Královehradecký)
- in Portugal: Bloco de Esquerda, CDS-PP, Partido Comunista Português, PCTP/MRPP, PEV, PSD (Portugal), Partido Socialista (Portugal)

System:
(1) new functionality
- Icons creation was extended to allow processing of standard portraits and if desired the negative portrait of a candidate
- site for European Union politicians 1politician.eu was published
(2) improvements
- the site coded was adjusted to allow URL addresses hide PHP extension
- the filter in Icons was redesigned
- process of creation candidates and new polls was redesigned
- title page in box of Languages received national flags
- title page in box of Friendly sites received national flags
- Politicians in database can now be exposed in two countries separately (the option was required mainly by European countries where politicians may work both on national and EU level)

Thursday, February 5, 2009

update 2009 #3

DATA:
(1) new candidates
- in Libya: Muamar al-Gaddafi
- in Germany: Freie Wähler
(2) new polls
- Political situation: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, EU, France, Georgia, Hungary, India, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Libya, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, UK, Venezuela

SYSTEM:
(1) new functionality
- index page in TOP10 and 24hot has got a button to erase user filter and put the selection into default view
- list of cooperating sites was published
(2) improvements
- TOP10 and 24hot remembers its filter setup
- some less important pages were excluded from Google robots.txt
- contact form was updated on 1politics
- extended registration form was rewritten

Monday, January 26, 2009

update 2009 #2

DATA:
(1) new candidates
- in European Union: Greens – European Free Alliance, Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, Independence/Democracy, Alliance for Europe of the Nations, European People's Party–European Democrats, European United Left–Nordic Green Left
- in Germany: Rebecca Harms, Heide Rühle, Sven Giegold, Barbara Lochbihler, Markus Ferber, Monika Hohlmeier
(2) new polls
- in Switzerland: Personenfreizügigkeit
- in Germany: Deutsche Wiedervereinigung

SYSTEM:
(1) new functionality
- page about our Offer was added in order to clearly describe basics of our offer and possible potential of cooperation
- error page 404 was implemented in ElectionsMeter style
- Contact page was enhanced to allow web form of immediate contact
- portraits of politicians on index site are now dynamic acordingly to the TOP10 and 24HOT user selection
(2) improvements
- page About includes a “cloud” picture
- procedure for language identification when a new user makes first access to the website was reviewed
- title of published voting icons was reviewed to be more descriptive
- title of webpages was reviewed to be more descriptive
- static flash object of srolling portrais was removed from index site

Thursday, January 22, 2009

emails may not work temporarily

We are sorry to say that our emails in contact list may not work now. We host our email boxes at WindowsLiveHotmail servers. Since the last week we are experiencing some problems with receiving of emails. The problem has been escalated already. We are patiently waiting for WindowsLiveHotmail solution.

For emergency and backup reasons feel free to contact us via ElectionsMeter@gmail.com.

update 2009 #1

Data:
(1) new candidates
- in the Czech republic: Svoboda, Sojdrova, Brezina, Linek, Filipiova, Svoboda P., Bendl, Kocab
(2) new polls
- in the Czech republic: Predseda KDU-CSL
- in Israel: Political situation in Israel

System:
(1) new functionality
- index page of ElectionsMeter now contains menu to access listing of all Arguments and all Opinions also a listing of all Polls and submenu for Politicians, Political parties, Elections and Events
- a page was developed to make available our site official logos, banners and buttons. We invite you to grab those logos with the HTML code. Feel free to publish our logo and link our site widely.
- when an Argument is displayed then in right upper corner get appears a button to the related national site (if such exists), national sites are 1st Politician, 1Politiker etc.
(2) improvements
- index page, TOP TEN box was a little bit simplified (number of votes is not displayed now)
- 1Politik.cz index page, box of politicians was prolonged

Blog goes public

There is nothing much to say other then just we issued ElectionsMeter blog. We hope there will be enough time on our side to keep it working. At least we will publish some ElectionsMeter site news on this blog. Stay tuned.