For all those WordPress enthusiasts out there, I have found a valuable plugin which will further enhance the socialistic nature blogs have on the internet community.  It is a star rating system so visitors can rate each post and/or page.  It is called gd star rating and can be downloaded on the WordPress website.  It only functions on WordPress version 2.5 and higher, so if you haven’t already upgraded your WordPress to version 2.6 you are definitely leaving your visitors with a below average user experience.  From a functional point of view it is very easy to setup, the only slight hiccup I had was figuring out how to disable the rating system for my blog pages and only using it for my blog posts.  All I had to do was click on a tick box in the administrators user panel to disable it.  You are also able to insert the gd star rating widget which displays your top rated blog posts in the sidebar.

Just yesterday I used it in The Western Nostril and we are already seeing the benefits of it’s interactivity. The Western Nostril is a comic strip published in the Business Day newspaper (South Africa) every Tuesday to Friday, with the star ratings we can now analyse which comics are rated the best by the public.  This plugin will become a very powerful tool over an extended period of time.

The biggest benefit for me is that now I can see what my readers enjoy and what they don’t. It has forced me to sharpen my skills because of the visitor feedback.

Updated: 07 November 2008

I have found another star rating plugin which you can incorporate into Feedburner. It’s a plugin from Outbrain, now your readers can rate your post from within the inbox or RSS reader.

I am busy testing it on my site, I like it so far.  If there is a downside it is that they insert related links below the star ratings.  Is this good or bad?  I guess it offers the reader more resources in case your article doesn’t fulfill them…  Oh dear!

Updated: 18 February 2009

One can disabled the related links underneath each post, which helps keep your posts more personal and doesn’t distract your visitors.

Updated: 18 May 2009

WebGrowth is back to using GD Star Rating on its website, we have found that Outbrain affects load time of web pages negatively. GD Star Rating now has a much more comprehensive settings panel. Although, our only complaint is that we cannot find how to remove the number of votes that have been made next to the stars.