I’ve recently created a new Jekyll site, hosted on GitHub Pages, and I’d like to allow for users/readers of the site to participate in special polls, for example, at the end of a blog post asking what the reader thought of the article. I plan for them to be multiple choice question boxes that tally answers and display results upon submission.
I’ve tried several HTML poll making services such as Pollcode and Powr, which do technically work as advertised, even with a static site generator such as Jekyll, however, most of these services either direct you off-site to see the results, or require a paid plan that doesn’t allow for much customization.
The closest thing I’ve found was jekyll-survey, a plugin created by Matthijs for simple surveys and questionnaires, but this didn’t seem very helpful to my project.
If there is a way to do this on Jekyll, I have a few conditions:
- The polls must stay on page to show submissions/results.
- The polls must be fully customizable, i.e. they could be easily styled with CSS and/or JS.
- The polls’ result data must be easily viewable and editable, if needed.
Ideally, something like Twitter or Reddit polls.
So far, I’ve thought of a couple untested ways to do this:
- Run my site through an actual dynamic web host/server, and create a MySQL database to count submissions for each choice. I would most likely do this with Hostinger, and have the site deploy from my _site folder on GitHub. Hostinger is the only web host that I know of that allows for deploying from a git repository.
- Run my site through Netlify, and configure a poll through Netlify’s built-in form handling.
- Somehow reconfigure the code for a service like Disqus, to allow for user poll inputs.
I don’t currently have a user/login system on my site, and I’d like to avoid setting that up unless necessary. If anybody has experience with this issue, please let me know. Thanks in advance!