A Great Little Star Rating Sytem
Last Friday I was talking about a document rating system, which used Ajax. It came about following a meeting with the client where we discussed ways to get the most useful content to the user when they opened the homepage. One solution was to show the most often accessed documents and the other to also show content ranked by the user-driven ratings.
Never having implemented a document rating system I suggested it to the client partly because it was a solution to their needs and partly because I fancied the "challenge" and always like to do something new in each project, rather than churn old the same old techniques over and over.
It didn't take much looking to find a decent visual tool for rating a document. Like all great solutions it's the pure simplicity that makes it stand out. All it requires is a UL with as many LI elements as you want stars, one graphic and 60 lines of clever CSS. No JavaScript needed!
You can see a working demo and download the code on the link to the Komodo Media site. Later this week I'll have a working Domino version online for you to play with and download.
Skip to the 
You can subscribe to an individual
I was looking for one of these last week. But I decided to go with Starbox {Link} instead. All my Web apps use Prototype so it's an obvious choice for me.
Of course the hardest part of using something like this is the actual database backend. Do you update the actual document? Do you have a seperate document? How do you handle conflicts? So much to think about.
I implemented a star rating system into the latest version of BlogSphere. It's using jQuery as the base javascript library and uses cookies to record what items you have rated so that you can only rate an item once.
You can see it running on my own site for a demo and feel free to download the latest BlogSphere and have a look at the code to see how I implemented it.
Hej Dragon,
Starbox is indeed really nice!