Amdall Gallery

After significant trial and error, I finally nailed displaying survey results on this blog!  It’s fairly easy, now that I’ve figured it out.  Just publish a page in your Google Spreadsheet (you can create a graph tab rather than publishing the entire thing).  After that, copy the embedded link and paste into the blog.  It’s that simple!

As an added bonus, each time a new person fills out the form, Google republishes the spreadsheet!  This should update the numbers, and subsequently, the graphs on this blog post.   The statistics are fairly interesting, I think.  The question about transplanting your brain into a robot I thought would strongly favor both extremes; the “absolutely” choice for those who fear human mortality, and the “no way” group that would oppose such a thing on religious or moral grounds.  So far, the respondents have not had black or white opinions on this, and about half are not certain.

The second question’s results to this point are just as interesting!  A solid majority of people have indicated that space travel is a waste of resources, which I found quite surprising.  I’ve always thought having some redundancy to our genetic legacy with other planetary colonies was a very important long term goal for humanity.  Sort of like backing up a computer’s hard drive; if our hard drive (planet) were to die, it would be good to have a reliable backup.  It’d be a shame to waste all that miraculous life and time invested in evolution!  It seems most people, at least of our small sample size, favor a more…well…pragmatic approach.

So, here are the results:

Prior to figuring this solution out, I tried quite a few other things.  Prepare…for A BORING EXPLANATION!

The quiz was originally made using Google Documents, and the form can show a really nice looking Response Summary.  Unfortunately, you can’t just embed the results page, as you can with the actual form.  A workaround is to temporarily check the “let everyone see the response summary” box, and link it to “https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=”

Once this is established, supposedly you can disable the “let everyone see results” thing.  To my disappointment, you can’t actually display the results within the blog post; only a link like this:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dDNwWDBYUDFDVlBBOF84TGp3S05HbWc6MQ

Next, I tried using shortcode (my post after this one).  According to WordPress support, this should work.  Perhaps it’s my inexperience, but I couldn’t get anything to display using the recommended shortcode:  [gdoc key= “dDNwWDBYUDFDVlBBOF84TGp3S05HbWc6MQ”]

Finally, I came across this entry from WordPress support:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/google-docs/

This worked perfectly, and without any shortcode or extremely complex trickery.