radio-buttons and PHP; may be a bit OT.

[Bill Moran]

In response to Gary Kline <kline at thought.org>:

> 	After a lot of trial and error I have a PHP version of radio buttons
> 	working in a test.php.  It asks the user to rate the article/story 
> 	in standard Lykert (5-way) methodology.  1) Liked ... to 5) Disliked.
> 
> 	The code works; still polishing for errors.  I need a way to store the
> 	results, tho.  So, for story baz.php, say, should I save the count of
> 	times rated, then average [%f] the ratings?  Or is there a more swift
> 	algorithm?

In my experience, you're best off storing the raw data, then generating
statistics in a separate step.  That way, if you decide that you want to
generate different statistics (mean vs. mode, for example) you still have
the raw data to do so.

If you're storing the results in a flat file, just have have the script
append the new results to the end of the file, then have another process
that comes along and reads the file, and generates a different file with
the statistics.

Of course, this is even easier if you're using a database.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com
http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/