Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve just added a new feature to my blog. Users can now “star” any post they like. When you star a post, it will appear at the top of the “recently starred” list on the right hand side of the blog. It will stay there until other people push it off the bottom of the list by starring other posts. Since I presume almost nobody will use this feature, this means that lots of people will see a link to the page you star.

I read the other day about how to put popular pages on a list using Google Analytics, and very clever it was, although it seems a massively over-engineered solution. So I thought for a while and came up with starring. I think it should be a little more interesting — this way the pages like How To Crack Captchas which feature heavily in search engine hits because apparently people just love cracking captchas won’t drown out that one person who randomly happened across a two-year-old rant and liked it. We shall see, though.

You can’t have the same page on the “starred” list twice. Starring a page already on the list will just bump it back up to the top again. At the moment, the list is set up to display ten posts (once people star ten posts), but that could change. I keep meaning to redesign the sidebars anyway.

I’m not really sure why I called it “starring” when there isn’t a little star graphic. Maybe there will be one day, but probably I’ve just been spending too long using Google Reader. If anyone would like to add this to their WordPress blog, they should get in touch.