New blog feature: Star ratings

Today seems to be tech day, which isn't as easy as it seems for this very non-tech blogger who is definitely not in the category of Thomas, Randy, Jasia and some others in our geneablogging community.

However, there are great sites with excellent information.

After struggling with the Blogger star ranking widget and getting nowhere after all kinds of potchke-ing (Yiddish, fooling around with details) with code, etc., I gave up and looked for something less difficult.

I found it in Outbrain.com, an Israeli website based in Netanya and New York.

Tracing the Tribe has just added Star Ratings from that site. The widget was very simple to install (automatic, nothing to fool around with), the report feature seems to provide good reports and it is very easy to manage.

When I had a question about a function, I wrote to Outbrain.com's CEO Yaron Galai, who had signed the welcome email. I'm very happy to report that I received a very quick and personal response from him with the solution.

Bloggers can also enable recommended posts (a longer list, a short list or none). I had that up for a short time, but felt the suggestions were not really appropriate, so I set it to none.

At the bottom of each post, readers will see this:

Tracing the Tribe hopes that this rating system will help those readers who are too busy to write comments to still participate in informing the community.

I've also enabled the Top Posts feature, but it will take some time for that to properly report.

Of course, Tracing the Tribe would love to see this:

While I really enjoy reading the comments of readers who take the time to personally respond, I know there are many more out there who don't feel comfortable with written comments. I hope that more readers will participate now.

Try it out!