Friday, May 25, 2007

SpotBack - Rating Widget for Blogger

Blogger Style:
Working with:
UPDATE: This service is no longer active. Too bad, it would have been invaluable for structured ratings data.

Rating widgets allow your readers to interact with your blog and provide you, the writer, with feedback on what they deem your articles to be worth. There are an abundancy of rating widget services on the Internet and typically are of the vanilla "five star" variety.


Enter Spotback's Rate Everything widget which brings not only the ability for your readers to rate your posts, but other features with the purpose of generating more user interaction with your blog. The widget enables your readers to tag your posts, find personalized recommendations and referrals to other destinations on your site. The service is free and childsplay to install.

Your rating and tagging history will be saved to your personal profile and provide you with statistics on what your readers really do think. Tagging history could possibly be used to develop keyword search term lists. If you know how they are tagging your posts, then it is not difficult to imagine how they would be searching for that information.

All of this is packaged into a completely customizable widget of your choosing. Either select a ready-made design from the SpotBack gallery or use the online editor to roll-your-own. The editor allows you to add any element you want into it (rate-this, tags, etc.) and define CSS properties for background images, font size and color, borders, labels, etc.

How to get your Spotback Rate Everything widget


Go to the Spotback Get a Widget page. You will be presented with a choice of widget styles. Just pick one that you feel comfortable with, you can always modify your choice later.

The next screen will enable you to register an account with Spotback. Creating an account allows you to access and manage your rated posts. After you complete the registration process, you will be able to create your personal rating and recommended content widgets.

Once your widget is selected (or built from scratch) grab the code for your style of blog (Classic/New) and paste it into your template. Since everyone's templates are different, you will have to feel your way around. But Spotback has some guidlines for both Classic and New Layouts.

If you like, I have designed a rater widget for Blogger. Instead of stars, it uses the orange B's -- you can see it just below this post.

7 comments :

Michael de`OZ said...

Hi! I found this hack in blogger.

Don Dino said...

I'm currently using your version of Spotback rate widget. Tend to like Blogger icon than stars :)

http://aglocotm.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Kewl! Yep, I thought having something different than those damn stars might make it stand out a little more. Not sure if it is working or not, but it is strange looking. :-)

abu abdirrahman said...

cool bro

Anonymous said...

good work bravo!
i start to make another blog:www.widget-box-install.blogspot.com and ill tell my friends about your blog.By the way u can add star rating from another site...very easy..outbrain.com
look very nice..bye

cardallya said...

Hi i used tthe trick on my blog latestsmscollection.blogspot.com You can visit it to use for free messaging. check out my stars. thanks for helping man.... regards.

Simon-Wilby said...

I share a blog with another blogger and I want to modify our template so that our names in the posted by: author links back to our own personal sites. How can I do this? Please help. Thanks