Outbrain: Dead Simple Rating Widget
Finding a rating widget on a wordpress blog is really easy, but finding a good widget is a little bit harder. After I posted that I was looking for a rating widget, I got tons of email from different websites telling me about their service. The first widget I looked at was promising, except it was in Greek and an ad link was at the bottom of every widget. Fortunately, the next one was from Outbrain, the widget I finally chose to use. I know I’m making a big deal over a simple rating widget, but I’ve had problems in the past with poor load times and formatting errors. The Outbrain rating widget extinguishes these previous issues.
My absolute favorite part of the widget is that it’s just for rating. No ajaxy effects, advertisements, logos, and there isn’t a social networked tacked onto it. You don’t even have to register to get it. Many Web company’s make the mistake of trying to do everything, when they should focus on one thing and do it well. Outbrain, which is still pretty new, has done a pretty good job thus far on the widget. If you want to rate something, choose how many stars it’s worth and your done, it’s that easy (that just sounded like an infomercial, ugh).
The widget works on most popular blogging service (Typepad, Blogger, WordPress) and also works on traditional websites with the javascript version. On my blog, I am using the WordPress plugin and at first I encountered a formatting problem, but support fixed it for me, but I’ll get to that later. Recently, I added the iwphone plugin and I was skeptical that the widget would work, but it works perfectly on mobile Safari.
A newer feature was just (in the past couple of months) introduced to me. It’s called “Blogger Report” and it shows you how your posts were rated and the process they were rated (using the widget or Firefox plugin). It needs some work, but the report makes it much easier to see statistics of each post. If they would include some visual statistics like a graph and clean up the interface, I’ll be satisfied.
The main reason why I decided to use Outbrain was because of the support I had gotten. John LoGioco, the VP of Business Development, was extremely kind in helping me with any problem I had, no matter how simple or stupid it was. I would literally email him in the morning with a problem and he (and the rest of Outbrain crew) would have a fix for me later that day. It’s hard to find that kind of help with other companies.
I want Outbrain to keep the widget simple, but I do want to see some more functionality/features. Here is what I want to see:
- the ability to change the look of the widget, colors and shapes
- ratings are the same as the permalink’s ratings
- ratings are saved and kept saved
The Outbrain rating widget is dead simple and does it’s job well. New functionality is always being added and support is just an email away. Give the Outbrain widget a try by clicking on the stars below.
