Saturday, August 26, 2006

Rating Widget

My brother-in-law Nick is, I am proud to say, a fellow Blogspot blogger. His blog, saskbirding.blogspot.com, is a bit different than mine though in that he posts pictures instead of words (and since the former are worth a thousand of the latter I have to blog like a mad woman just to keep up). Anyway, I have seen some other photo sites where one can rate the pictures and I thought this might be a cool project to try out.

I decided to see if I could find something that could just be dropped into the blog post template, but instead I found a tutorial for a five star rating system based on CSS. This tutorial was great for making the display, but didn't come with a back end. So last night I created a database for it and wrote up a page that will save the data to the database as well as read back the average rating. I added it to my blog by adding some javascript into the blogger template. It works great for automatically adding a way to rate a blog post, but unfortunately it isn't going to work all that well for Nick's photos - unless he stores each picture in a different blog post, but his format so far doesn't fit that model. I'll see what he says, but in the meantime, try out the new rating widget on my site.

P.S. I've disabled the ability to rate any articles less than 4/5 stars. (jk)

P.P.S. This is post 198!

5 comments:

Ariia said...

This goes above and beyond the call of programmer geekiness :)

cool idea though!

Nick S said...

It would be cool to 'tweak' the template some more and add other little tricks , like my new ' hit counter' I added the other day for instance.
thanks for thinking of me ;-)

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah, like I followed all of that. So is that based on transistors or large scale integration? :)

Sarah J M said...

Yes!! Somebody rated it!

Sarah J M said...

P.S. This rating widget doesn't really suit this sort of blog, so I am going to take it off pretty soon. If you are reading my blog later on wondering why it isn't there, that is why :)