ShortcutGuide Blog

Keyboard Shortcuts Star Rating Feature

Why reinvent the wheel?

Since ShortcutGuide was started about a year and a half ago, there has always been a desire to put in more filtering mechanisms so that users can easily find the “most useful”/”highest utility” keyboard shortcuts. A quick and dirty approach was using JS-Kit Ratings. After running the service on the site for several days, I can summarize the pros and cons

Advantages:

• Simple to implement
• Great UI
• Offload bandwidth/processing

Disadvantages

• Lack of control
• Availability (downtime)

After weighing the options, I decided against the solution because of control of data (e.g., they hold all the data within their database to reduce complexity).

The ratings feature was put on the back burner for several months until today, when I was researching a solution that would provide all of the features I was looking for. The best rating system I found was written by Jordan Boesch, AJAX star rating. This AJAX script is now fully implemented on all of ShortcutGuide. Sorting by ratings will be feature next in line.