On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

I have seen a fair few sites who have employed the famous ’star rating’ gadget that has become one of the hallmarks of the Web 2.0 world shall we say. Aside from implementation (i.e. creating them from gracefully constructed forms with radio buttons when JavaScript is disabled/not present) there is the actual nuts and bolts of what they do.

I have noticed a worrying trend that if taking the angle that they are to get a public ranking of the page/item etc. most of them fail.

• Some use the star rating as a personal rating that only you see. Not particularly useful to yourself (you know what you said surely?), not useful to others (i.e. a poor item will not be flagged as such) and worse still of no use to the site designers/coders as they won’t get this feedback.
• Some use the star rating system but upon clicking then reveal a hidden form that has even further options. I don’t like this. I clicked on the star rating because I assumed it was a quick way for me to feedback a quantitative opinion on an item/article without needing to fill in a form, without needing to sign up etc. This switches me off.

The latter is a personal hate.

So, algorithmically I have the following star rating plan:

• It is a quick one hit quantitative way for every user to rate the current page, for this to be sent back to the server (anonymously) and where ratings exist for it to be factored into the average that is displayed by defaul to user when first visiting the page. I think the average used would be a ‘median’ value if my statistics memory (which is worse than very poor) serves me right.

So the sequence I am employing for a website… is:

1. User visits page
2. Page queries database for current average rating which is displayed to the user
3. User can submit rating by clicking their star rating which is fed back to the server and factored into the current average. If no record for the page exists a new record is created with this new average.
4. Score is updatd on page to reflect new average and star control is locked to read only to save on multiple submissions. (A crude way of stopping abuse by multiple clicks — of course this will be undone when the page is refreshed; but this means that no server side recognition of the current client is required and therefore no private data or user data is submitted or stored on the server/database.)
5. Every page has a link to a feedback form which the user has to explicitly elect to visit and send, rather than it being sprung upon them. This would take the HTTP Referer string to capture the page which 97% of the comments will relate to. (Experience dictates that ~3% will use the most obscure of forms that they find to submit utterly unrelated queries. I have had a complaint on general service submitted to a grafitti form before now….
6. Goto 1

This will let users see what others generally think, submit their quantitative opinion without hassle and for the site creators/maintainers/analysts/coders to use the data to evaluate website content quality.

Of course so much of this is very basic but so often I see such  bad implementations of so many things that I only wish time and effort was poured in, even to the smallest of things.

Note, this is a long heartfelt blog post. It’s not the usual web evangelism angle but a unique one. Whether you give it the time of day is neither here or there but the matter remains–what I’ve written here means a lot to me.

Interesting is how I would call the past couple of months or so. I don’t tend to write personal stuff on this blog because I don’t think this is the place. That said that wasn’t the case even just a couple of months ago when I wrote far too much personal stuff which has now been channelled into Memoirs of a Time:

I finished as soon as I could in the service station [Knutsford on the M6] and dashed back out into the rain to fumble with my keys getting them into the door lock, jumping into my steel cocoon and just sat cowering. Everywhere I went there was a superlative in human form to compare myself to. The end result was a lasting impression of inferiority. The Lakes were my dearest hope that peace to quell the thunder in my heart would come. I just needed to calm down; inhale the crystalline air and listen to platitude; feel clear sparkling water run through my thoughts, that would cleanse and quench my thirst and resolve my war.

from Memoirs of a Time “Northern Links” by Victoria J.K. Lamburn

The thunder was quelled and since then I have really got back on track with so many things. One of those is really taking a good hard look at what’s happening in the world of web development and ultimately the career I absolutely love with a passion.

This isn’t an exercise in bragging though; rather an explanation in my words of something I have ‘hit’ that has been a part as much as anything in digging myself out of the rut I had got into this year up until mid July.

I was talking to Cotia (one of my best mates) the other night over what soon ended up almost three bottles of wine between us (didn’t feel drunk at all, quite odd, felt very tired the next day and still paying…) and we were talking about when we started University in 2002; by which point I got really excited because that is exactly what I wrote about (although about September 2007 rather than October 2002) is that Autumnal air that we all feel press down on our shoulders, like a familiar face leaning over your shoulder radiating a perverse warmth in the cold biting air.

I am a very reflective person, I value halcyon, I harbour the past with me even when I look forward half of me looks over my shoulder with a smile. I’ll always be like this, and I like being like it. I look back on that innocuous and mundane time of waiting for a train at Moulsecoomb station in Brighton in October, in the afternoon of a dawning winter with the perfectness of fading light. So what is it that I’ve hit?

Nothing bad but something to look forward to. Earlier this month I went to the Barcamp in Brighton which was a real eye opener. Not so much on the technical front which was just phenomenal some of things that are being done with the web a mere 12 years after I got into creating my first web page. (In 1995, things were primitive and in my case it was an Amiga 1200 running AMosaic in 640×512 resolution. Yes, not the first but I was there in the days of NCSA Mosaic. *takes a geeky bow*)

The thing that took me aback was actually how much of a community circuit seems to revolve in the web development game and how deeply collaborative it can be. I’m very much a share and share alike person (there are reasons aside from price to be an exclusive Linux user) and I was impressed by this. In fact the collaborative nature of the beast wasn’t purely one upmanship but seemingly the product of passion. When you use a website, have you considered whether the people/person behind it was thinking, “I really want them to enjoy this site, I hope they like it.” Passion, flair, creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, exactitude and dynamism is what drives the web economy and its this marvelous afterglow that makes the Dotcom burst of 2000/2001 seem not a surprise but an inevitability of naievty in the market at that time. Now there seems something so much more soulful behind the motivation of the true pioneers. (I’m not one of those, I follow once the path is well trod–I suppose I’m the Slackware of web developers!)

Notice I am hesitant to say ‘Web 2.0′ as it’s become almost a joke in itself but when you cut through the hype and increasingly nonsensical descriptions, I personally can see the marked difference in the web of today to that of even 3 years ago. In three years time? That’s the buzz, that’s the excitement. What other industry is on the cutting edge of enterprise like that of the web developer?

I’ve hit that realisation that whilst I don’t hope to really create the next killer web app, or killer web site, it’s reinvigorated an enthusiasm inside of me that is just sitting there with me when I write that first line…

<!DOCTYPE html...

Isn’t that a wonderful feeling!

I suppose there is only one thing more that I love more than designing and coding websites, and that’s writing:

At the same time with the flowing patience was a lowered tone in my subvocal thoughts that enunciated my conviction’s brevity to every syllable. That dreadful Monday night changed from the most terrifying of storm clouds to the gentle drifting wisps in the sky whose shadows did not leave me in the shade. Because soon whichever way fate played it, I knew at last I could be free of everything that had raged inside of me, all of that which has brought me down at the slightest faltering step.

from Memoirs of a Time “Elysium” by Victoria J.K. Lamburn