Reviewing Things
Last week I added a category titled simply, “Things.” It’s the place I keep the reviews of things I find in the Universe. There are many things in the Universe, and I have an opinion on many of them, some of which could be helpful for others, such as yourself.
Since I decided that I wanted to start reviewing things, I figured, like all good users of WordPress, I would add a plugin or two that would help me express my opinions (in 3200 database calls or less). Perusing the options for ratings plugins, I wondered to myself, “Why don’t I just use some Unicode stars?” And so I did just that.
While trying to over–think this, I just decided that I would just put in the star ratings. On a scale of 1 to 5, how good or bad is this thing? Since this isn’t YouTube, there isn’t going to be the inevitable 2.5 rating that almost every video on the site gets after the wisdom of crowds takes hold.
Then, I use an obscure HTML tag that I can only guess I’m not supposed to anymore. The <big> tag takes something that looks like this:
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
And makes it look like this:
★ ★ ★ ★
The fun thing is, since this isn’t driven by some sort of CSS hack, and by an honest–to–goodness tag, it’ll show up in your RSS reader of choice. And it better show up larger, because I don’t really want to add a whole lot to each review. Gotta fill up some space, you know. Nothing worse than having your point made, and then not padding it to make it seem like you have more to say, when you really should just stop. People don’t like brevity, anymore. Give ’em a few 19–sentence paragraphs, that’ll show ’em.
And that is exactly why I don’t add anything else.1 If I post a terrible review, you’ll probably want to know why it was so bad. You’ll probably use some sort of internet search engine to find other reviews of the same thing. You’ll then see that others thought the item was either as good or bad as I said it was, or much better or worse.
Since you have your own opinion of things, you’ll probably take my review and let it shape your opinion. It could be that you can let my words (really just Unicode stars) embolden your own decision. It could also be that I set your soul ablaze with a seething rage. Anywise, I hope that my terse, prosaic entries help others who want to know about things.
- Okay, so I add some snide remarks in the excerpt. That’s just because Google gets upset when you don’t have enough content in a post. Go figure. ↩