OK - so it's not ready yet. In fact if I'm being completely honest it will probably break more often than it works right now. But I just couldn't wait any longer to get my latest, greatest widget out here on my blog posts (in beta of course).
So without further ado - let me introduce you to StoryRank. A simple little widget that will let you rate things.
I know, I know. There's nothing earth shattering about rating things. And in-fact there are plenty of others that already make rating widgets (I actually just re-stumbled upon a pretty decent one at js-kit.com today).
So why am I excited about this and so anxious to get it out there?
First, I didn't build the widget to compete with anyone else or because I thought it was going to be the first to market. I didn't even do that much research on the rating widget idea before I started building it.
No I built it primarily so I could use it on my own blog posts and stories as an additional way to gather feedback and figure out what I should write more about. But I did figure if I was going to build it, I might as well try to make it general enough that other's could use it as well if they wanted.
Second, my idea goes a little beyond the basic rating widget. The actual concept is not only to allow get things like blog posts rated, but to also index them as they get rated (the first time a post is rated, it gets marked for inclusion in the storyrank index).
The ultimate goal being that, by indexing the stories as well as rating them, we can have a story-based search engine that let's us find the "best" stories for a given search.
At this point, you probably have a ton of questions like "will it work?" and "how do you make money?" - well I currently have a lot of the same questions. The best I can do right now is honestly answer that I don't know but I hope to find out soon.
Anyway, I'm hoping by now you're at least a little interested in helping me to test out the new widget by plugging it into your own blog or web site. So let me go over how to use it. It's simple really, just copy the following code into any page or story you want ranked:
<script type="text/javascript">
var plink = "YOUR_PERMALINK_DETAILS_HERE";
</script>
<script src="http://www.storyrank.com/rank.php"></script>
Just be sure to replace the YOUR_PERMALINK_DETAILS_HERE with your blog post permalink (the permanent URL to your unique story or blog post). This value will be used to both calculate your unique stories ranking as well as the link to direct users to your site from storyrank.com.
And that's all there is to it (if you do it right it should look something like the ranking bit at the bottom of this post).
Since I use WordPress to run this blog, I also figure I might as well give you the basic details on how to plug it into that as well. Again it's pretty simple, just go to your theme editor, and find your index page (and your single post page). Then wherever you want your ranking stars to show (generally after the 'the_content' call), place the following code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var plink = "<?php echo the_permalink(); ?>";
</script>
<script src="http://www.storyrank.com/rank.php"></script>
If everything goes to plan you should then start to have ranking stars with everyone of your posts (just like I now do)! And as each story get's ranked, it should start to get indexed and added to the StoryRank.com lists and web site.
Enjoy and let me know what you think (and how I should fix and improve it).
