"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." »» Mahatma Gandhi

Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin

Posted on January 7, 2009
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Part of the Wonderful WordPress Wednesdays Series - Previous in series         

Welcome to the eleventh installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series. Today’s lesson is a quick little hack for one of my favorite plugins: WP-PostRatings (by the irrepressible Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan) which adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s posts.  I don’t use it here on Philaahzophy, but it’s a vital part of several other blogs that I manage.

My problem occurred on my amusement park and roller coaster video blog where I also use a plugin (that I previously wrote about) to schedule posts for future dates.  You see, I’ve noticed that people are far more likely to actually rate a post if others have already done so.  Therefore I was visiting each post after it was published and rating it myself.  This can become bothersome since I schedule posts on that blog days or even weeks in advance.  What I needed was for the WP-PostRatings plugin to add a default rating score to every post as it was published.  Luckily, with a little poking around and some help from more PHP-knowledgeable friends I was able to come up with a solution.

Simply navigate to Plugins > Editor > WP-PostRatings in your WordPress admin area and scroll down to lines 763-766 which read as follows:

add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_users', 0, true);
add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_score', 0, true);
add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_average', 0, true);

Now, change the values in each variable to reflect your default ratings. For example, to have each post be published with a single rating and a score of 4 you would change the code to appear as follows-

add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_users', 1, true);
add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_score', 4, true);
add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_average', 4, true);

You can set whatever default ratings you like, but make sure that your math works out or you’re likely to get some type of error.

  • ratings_users refers to the number of different people that have entered their rating
  • ratings_score is the total value of all the ratings thus far added together
  • ratings_average is the current score of the post

So you’ll want to make sure that ratings_score divided by ratings_users is equal to ratings_average.  If you’re worried about the math, just use the values in the example above and all of your posts will publish with a rating of 4 granted by a single user (you do think all of your posts are worthy of at least 4 out of 5 stars, don’t you?).

As always, if you have any difficulty with this tip, questions about using WordPress more effectively, suggestions for future articles in this series, or just want to say ‘Hi’ or ‘Thanks’, comments are always very much appreciated!  And if you found this post useful or informative, please consider adding it to your choice  social bookmarking sites (StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc).

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Top Hosting Center Rudolph Lifetime Web Hosting Scam Returns

Posted on January 5, 2009
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Part of the Top Hosting Center Series - Previous in series         

Top Hosting Center is once again offering their Rudolph web hosting plan for “lifetime web hosting”.  This time around they’ve got two different Rudolph web host plans, but it’s still the same scam they were running last year (and which I, unfortunately, fell for).

They’re up to the same old tricks they were running last time around - having employees pose as independnet bloggers, etc, but they still can’t seem to keep their servers online.  If you don’t believe me or think I’m just bitter try reading the comments section of any of my past posts on Top Hosting Center.  They simply can’t handle the load they have now, but are looking to sell more space on their already overloaded servers.

Oddly enough, my old nemesis “John Raul” never wrote about the new Rudolph plans.  He’s the THC employee who was running all around the internet last year claiming to be a satisfied customer when he was, in fact, on the payroll.  To pHosting Center’s CEO, Eric Vanier, even replied to his various John’s various comments as if he was a customer while sending him a regular monthly paycheck.  Those of you who have followed this story here at Philaahzophy will recall that John claimed I got him fired a few months back.  Well, according to his latest blog posts not only is he still working for THC, but apparently he has fallen in love with Eric Vanier as well.  Very strange indeed.

BTW, THC has finally stopped pretending to be the “#1 Budget Hosting” company and is, instead, touting their “Top 10 Fastest Growing” award from HostReview.  Knowing how much Eric likes to make things up out of whole cloth I looked into it and it turns out that the “fastest growing” category is compiled completely by votes solicited by the web hosting companies themselves.  HostReview still has not reviewed the company itself and does not endorse it in any way.  Rather, this “award” is just a matter of Eric, John, and their cohorts gaming the system by repeatedly voting for themselves from various IP addresses.  Not very impressive as far as awards go, but very sad indeed for a company that tries to project a profesional image.

As for the word “scam”, regular readers know I don’t use it lightly.  But what else can you call a company that regularly advertises “Guaranteed 99.9% Uptime”, delivers around 85% uptime, and refuses to even acknowledge, much less grant, their users request for compensation?

If you’re just looking for a cheap place to host your own domain, than Top Hosting Center may srever your purposes.  But if you want to know that your website’s going to be online whenever anyone wants to visit it, I’d consider any of the thousands of other web hosting options out there.

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Applied Anarchy - Make Freedom A Bestseller

Posted on January 5, 2009
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As you probably already know, anarchists, libertarians, and freedom lovers are really big on books. In fact, the written word is still, by far, the greatest influence on the vast majority of converts. The problem with this is two-fold: 1) many of the books are dry and boring, and 2) the books aren’t exactly easy to “stumble across” if you’re not looking for them.  Freedom Book Club aims to solve both of these problems and you can help.

Each month four selections are posted at the Freedom Book Club home page.  All you need to do is swing by and vote for your favorite.   Then, during the first week of the next month, everyone interested will buy the selected book.  Voting for a selection does not obligate you to buy the book that is ultimately selected.

So, how does this help further the message of freedom?  It’s simple really.  Bestseller lists (New York Times, Amazon, etc) aren’t actually based on how many copies of a book get purchased.  rather, they’re based on how many books are purchased within a given time frame.  In other words, it’s velocity not volume.  By having hundreds (thousands?) of liberty lovers all purchase a specific book within the same week we can rocket these books up onto the best seller lists and get them much more attention from the general public.

Additionally, since each month’s book is selected by popular vote we can concentrate our efforts on works that are much more palatable to a general audience. For example…

Last month’s selection, Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression by Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, PhD sold out at Amazon.com not once, but twice. Of course, the Freedom Book Club has no way of knowing if they were the direct cause of such a rush on a 5 year old book, but their efforts certainly didn’t hurt! Healing Our World is, quite possibly, the ultimate primer on freedom. Written in an easygoing, friendly style it still manages to tear apart just about every possible reason one could have for remaining a statist despite government’s repeated failures. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend that you not only put it on your reading list, but that you put it at the very top.

But I’m getting sidetracked again. Just take a few minutes to check out Freedom Book Club.  Not only will you help spread the message of liberty to the masses, but you just might find a few books to enjoy and enlighten at the same time.

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Christmas Coaster Wish Comes True!

Posted on January 5, 2009
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Y’all remember what I asked Santa Claus for this year, don’t ya?  That’s right, a roller coaster.  Well, the empty lot across the street from my apartment is still empty, but that doesn’t mean Santa Claus let me down completely.  As I predicted a full size roller coaster was a bit too much to fit into Santa’s bag, but he did still deliver with flying colors.  And no, I’m not talking about the new Terminator: The Coaster wooden roller coaster that Six Flags announced will be opening at Magic Mountain this spring.  Nope, I’m talking about my very own 64-piece MagNext iCoaster!


MagNext is the absolute leader of toy magnet in USA and their iCoaster is just fantastic! It comes with enough pieces to build just about any roller coaster design you desire, 10 different designs to get you started before setting out on your own, a Perpetual Magnetic Elevator to keep the thrills running around the clock, nearly two dozen background music and sensor beats, the ability to plug in your iPod or MP3 player to add unlimited music to your coaster experience, and even light up sensors to get all those really cool special effects.

Sure, i can’t actually ride my MagNext iCoaster, but I can plan, design and create literally hundreds of different coaster layouts and that’s (almost) as much fun ;)

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Super Dad Creates Disposable Drawing Lunchbots!

Posted on January 5, 2009
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Over the holidays Zaira sent me the link to Disposable Drawings, which was a bit of a mixed blessing.  What this Dad does is really, really cool, but it also stirs up doubts about what kind of father I’m turning out to be.

Every day this father creates a disposable drawing on his son’s lunch bag.  He does the same thing for his wife.  He even takes requests and, over the holiday break, began creating disposable drawing lunchbots for firends of his.  My guess is that he feels it’s “no big deal”, but I think it’s an amazing way to connect with your kid and a wonderful expression of his love and devotion as well.  Which is why I’m exceedingly jealous.

He’s only been doing this for a few months, but is already becoming a celebrity of sorts in the blogosphere with a t-shirt shop and everything.  He even just came out with his first music video which features a hilarious song (”Robots” by Flight Of The Conchords) and all of his lunchbots to date-

Swing by and bookmark Disposable Drawings or subscribe to his RSS feed because you’re not going to want to miss any of this cool art. That is, if you can stand the competition….

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