There are two different Ruby gems out there right now to choose from:

survey-gizmo-ruby Ruby Gem

Kabari Hendrick released this Ruby gem to integrate Ruby with the SurveyGizmo API v.1 using an ActiveModel style interface. It interfaces with survey API resources such as surveys, questions, pages, options, and responses. It also supports all of the actions provided by the API: get, create, update, delete, and get list. There is also error handling.

You can follow these links to check out the survey-gizmo-ruby repository, see an extended usage example, or read the documentation.

Kabari’s company, Lab42, uses it in a few different places, such as this survey tool.

surveygizmo Ruby Gem

Bobby Uhlenbrock with Ample built this Ruby Gem, which currently focuses heavily on pulling response data from the SurveyGizmo API.

Bobby told us, “My goal was to make this as easy to drop into an app as the Twitter gem. Therefore, if you’ve ever used the Twitter gem, this should make immediate sense.”

You can follow the links below to see the surveygizmo Ruby Gem repository, as well as check out the documentation.

**We’ve also added both of these gems to our Survey API Resources page to make them easy to find in the future.

What’s Next

Both developers told us that their gems weren’t yet finished, and could use some help in the form of contributors, bug-finders, etc…so if you’re a Ruby developer who wants to make it easy to integrate your apps with SurveyGizmo, go get involved!

We love it when people build cool things with our API – thanks to Bobby and Kabari for getting these started! If you’ve used these Ruby gems (or the SurveyGizmo API) to build something great, please drop us an email and let us know! We’d love to talk to you more about it.

We don’t like to talk about ourselves this way, but survey software is really just a glorified web form with a backend. (I’m on vacation this week, so the sales team won’t be able to take revenge on me for saying that on our blog.)

What that means is if you are clever you can use our tool to solve a large number of office issues. The one I want to tell you about is what we call our “Order Up” system for Pancake Thursdays at SurveyGizmo.

Every Thursday we cook eggs, bacon, sausages, and pancakes (with chocolate chips in fun patterns) for the entire company. We started doing this recently, and given that there’s about fifty of us in the office now, the first time we had Pancake Thursday it took almost 6 hours to get everyone served! So the next Thursday morning we had an idea: we would send out a survey to get everyone’s order and create a simple widget using our API to show the orders as they come in. As an added bonus, it would notify each employee with an email once their order was ready!

We call it the “Order Up” system – and we can’t live without it.

The survey was pretty simple. We have just two survey questions: “What’s your email address?” and a checkbox question for what items from the menu you’d like to eat.

We also created a hidden field to flag if the order has been completed or not. The respondent never sees it – we flag it through the API when the order is ready for pickup.

We then used the survey API to create the cook’s screen. Michael is inevitably the cook each week (it was his idea). So he has a laptop set up in the kitchen which refreshes and shows him the orders as they come in. The Order Up Survey also tallies how many strips of bacon, eggs, etc that have been ordered in real-time so he can cook in bulk.

The entire system only took about an hour to set up, and it’s been a fun and easy way to make Pancake Thursdays work and get it down to only two hours of cooking. (Not to mention we’ve been hiring…so there’s that).

I mention this just as a suggestion to everyone — keep your eyes open for neat ways that a data collection tool can be used to optimize all the little internal processes at your company. If you have an idea or have an unconventional way you’re using our survey software in your company, let us know!

If you are curious, here’s the (very dirty) PHP code that we used to build the order-up dashboard! Passwords and SurveyIDs have been changed to protect the innocent (and our pancake orders).

//----  start code (don't judge us on code style)

function makeapicall($url)
{
		$ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, 1);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

		$buffer = curl_exec($ch);

		if ($buffer === false) {
			return false;
		}
		curl_close($ch);

 	return unserialize($buffer);

}

if(isset($_GET['orderup']))
{
	$uri = "http://restapi.surveygizmo.com/head/Survey/555555/SurveyResponse/{$_GET['orderup']}.pson?_method=POST&user:pass=hehe@acme.com:12345&data[4]=Yes";
	$results = makecall($uri);

}

//get orders

$uri = "http://restapi.surveygizmo.com/head/Survey/555555/SurveyResponse.pson?user:pass=hehe@acme.com:12345&filter[field][0]=status&filter[operator][0]==&filter[value][0]=Complete&limit=500";

$results = makecall($uri);
$orders = array();
$orderups = array();

foreach($results["data"] as $result)
{
	if($result['status'] != 'Complete')continue;

	if($result["[question(4)]"] == "Yes")
	{
		if($result['id'] == $_GET['orderup'])
		{
			mail($result["[question(2)]"],"Your Pancake Thursday order is ready!","Come and Get it!!!!",null,"-fchristian@sgizmo.com");
		}
		$orderups[] = $result;
	}
	else
	{
		$orders[] = $result;
	}
}

Photo courtesy of Andrew Currie – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

Earlier this year, SurveyGizmo announced that we were moving to a platform model – opening up development of survey add-ons to third party developers. And today we’re pleased to announce: it’s here!

Let’s face it – it can be tough to keep surveys exciting. And with a huge selection of surveys out in the wild right now, combatting survey fatigue is becoming even more important than ever. Because of that, many of you have been looking for new ways to make your surveys more interactive and engaging – with our new Marketplace, we aim to help you do that and more.

Marketplace allows you to add enhanced question types, themes, templates, and more to your SurveyGizmo account – all from within your SurveyGizmo dashboard.

Here are some of the new survey features you’ll find inside:

Question Types

Marketplace opens with a ton of new survey question types you can use to spice up your surveys. From slider questions to embeddable survey maps and video questions, you can now easily customize your online surveys and make them more interactive.

Account Features

Want to add users or new survey themes to your SurveyGizmo account? Looking for a survey template to get you started building a masterpiece? The Marketplace isn’t just about question types – we’ve made room for add-ons of all shapes and sizes, including these sorts of global account features as well.

Other Survey Features

The Marketplace items aren’t limited to simple question types – there are endless possibilities as to what developers can create using our survey engine.

One key example is our new Opinion Tracker survey add-on, which allows your audience to interact with your website and share their opinions. It’s a pretty robust piece of software that includes commenting modules, both 5-Star and Thumbs-Up/Thumbs-Down Rating systems, and powerful reporting to sort through the results. With this software (which is built on top of SurveyGizmo survey software), you can solicit feedback on the content of any (or all) of your web pages.

We’ve already seen our customers gain some serious actionable data from Opinion Tracker – in particular, sites with a lot of pages (such as blogs and ecommerce sites) have used this add-on to gain valuable feedback on individual product pages or posts.

Like all of our Marketplace add-ons, installing Opinion Tracker is easy – just login to the Marketplace, purchase the item, and embed the code in your website.

We hope that opening up our platform and encouraging developers to use our survey API will increase the depth and breadth of question types and features available to our users. As we continue to expand and update the core functionality of SurveyGizmo, we look forward to Marketplace becoming the place you go to find custom add-ons that perfectly suit your unique needs.

To check it out, just login to your SurveyGizmo account today and look for the Marketplace tab.

Happy shopping!

**And if you’re interested in developing for us, that’s great! Here are the instructions for how to become a SurveyGizmo Marketplace developer. If you don’t know much about our survey API, you can head over to Developer’s Corner and read up on it – we’ll look forward to seeing what you create in the Marketplace soon! ]]> http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/new-feature-survey-marketplace/feed/ 0 http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/jive-software-surveygizmo-business-intelligence-integration/ http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/jive-software-surveygizmo-business-intelligence-integration/#comments Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:39:31 +0000 Kipp Chambers http://www.surveygizmo.com/?p=29037 Read More »]]> Great news for all you Jive Software users – SurveyGizmo is now integrated with Jive as a native app!