"Highest Rated" Sidebar Added
Submitted by Jeff Geerling on Tue, 04/14/2009 - 10:49pm
Tonight I finally added a sidebar which I was hoping to have on the website from the beginning, but didn't have the time to integrate. This site runs on Drupal, and uses the 'Fivestar' voting widget and Voting API to collect votes on each posting; unfortunately, these modules for Drupal don't provide a simple block that can be posted to the sidebar showing the highest rated content.
So, I was putting off manually making the block for quite some time, but finally installed the Views module on this site, then created a view to display the highest rated postings — it sorts first by the number of votes, then by the average rating of the post. Hopefully it will help new visitors find the best of the best here on LOLSaints quickly!
Any suggestions for further improvements to the website are always appreciated! Also, if you're interested in helping maintain the website and moderate comments, I'd love for you to help! Let me know in the comments below.
I think it would be better to only use the star rating to rank them and leave out the number of votes. The way it is now, a low-rated posting (such as "Can You Say This About a Saint?") gets on the list while other very high ranking postings (such as "Kickball Time!") get left off because they have not yet received enough votes. Meanwhile, all the ones on the list will receive more and more votes due to the increased exposure, leaving better ones with less exposure in the dust with little chance of ever making the list.
If a posting with few votes made the list unworthily, the exposure would lead to more votes that would quickly put it in it's proper place, thus evening out the playing field.
Just my thoughts!
And, no, it is not just that I'm jealous that my highly rated postings ( Kickball Time!, The Big Day, Jus' Makin' Sure, and Good Stewardship) haven't made the list...
...well, OK, maybe a little:)
BTW, how do U like my sneaky plugs up there?
I'll be working on these issues; I'm trying to get the best algorithm for which posts should show up in that section.
There are now three separate rankings in the sidebar... and we might get another one or two going soon!