Enhancing Your .Text Blog - Allowing Readers to Rate Blog Entries

Scott Mitchell writes about a neat feature he created for .TEXT in this article and this follow up article. Basically, it adds a "Rate This Content" control to each blog entry much like MSDN has for each of its articles. This allows you to let the author know just how much you love or hate the article, and hopefully provides some constructive (or if not constructive, at least humorous) criticism.

I'd love to take this one step further. Currently, when a blog supports one the CommentAPI, RSS Bandit allows you to comment on a post via a "Post Reply" context menu item. It'd be neat to create a "Rate This Item" API so that aggregators can allow users to rate a blog entry if the blog supports a ratings system. What do you think?

What others have said

Scott Mitchell Apr 24, 2004 11:52 AM

# re: Enhancing Your .Text Blog - Allowing Readers to Rate Blog Entries

I think it would be neat to support this feature in blogs. A ratingAPI standard, or something. There would need to be more thought put to the mechanisms on how this works, to limit someone flooding ratings of 1, or whatnot...

nospamplease75@yahoo.com (Haacked) Apr 24, 2004 12:59 PM

# RE: Enhancing Your .Text Blog - Allowing Readers to Rate Blog Entries

I have a few ideas on how to limit a ratings flood. It would be difficult to fully stop a ratings flood by a determined attacker.

For instance, someone could write an app to just screen scrape your blog and post ratings indiscriminately, ignoring cookies your site drops.

The main recourse I can think of is to throttle the number of ratings from an IP Address within a specific time period. We all know that AOL re-uses IP addresses, but the likelihood that two separate ratings will come from the same IP address within, say, an hour is low enough.

If you want to get extreme, there could be an option to require a valid e-mail address or a blog engine that supports the RatingAPI. So if user rates my blog entry, the rating doesn't show up until the user confirms the rating via email, or my blog confirms his blogs support of the ratingAPI. Most people won't need this kinda paranoia.