Ratings
Given the number of book and movie reviews I've written over the years, I thought it might be a good idea to provide some explanation of the ratings scale I use.
The 5-star Scale is used on sites like Amazon.com, Readernaut and Netflix. Unlike those sites, I use half-stars in my ratings, mostly because I like the flexibility of a 10-star scale (such as that used by IMDb.com, the Internet Movie Database) but think it sometimes looks a little busy on screen.
| Hated It | ★☆☆☆☆ |
| Didn't Like It | ★★☆☆☆ |
| Liked It | ★★★☆☆ |
| Really Liked It | ★★★★☆ |
| Loved It | ★★★★★ |
The labels for each star have been lovingly borrowed from Netflix, but Amazon.com and Readernaut use a similar system and I find it works pretty well.
The 27-point Scale was used in some of my early movie reviews and was meant to break a rating into three arbitrary categories, which were then combined to rate the product as a whole.
Here's an example from my review of Ghost Rider:
| Rocking Out: | ★★★★★★★★★ |
| Hell’s Angels: | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Fuego del Corazón: | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
I don't use this system anymore, but there are still one or two older movie reviews that have not been converted to the 5-star Scale.
To display these ratings, I use two WordPress plugins related to ratings:
- A modified version of WP Movie Ratings by Paul Goscicki provides all of the functionality for rating movies, including the list of recently-watched movies in the sidebar and the Movie Ratings Archive page.
- Xavin's Review Ratings by Jonathan "Xavin" Spence allows ratings to be displayed in-line within posts and pages (like this one).