The last of three suggestions I got from Mark and Dave, a story rating system, is now implemented (the other 2 were changing the banner image and moving the Google Hits box). You'll see it on both the main page as well as the story pages in the post footer (where the "Submitted by" information is). Dave recommended having a way to rate stories, and ultimately I'll have a page that displays stories by rating. If you're feeling bored, feel free to go back into the archives and rate past stories as well. I plan to do so myself, though with 600+ stories it's a daunting task.

You can rate a story from 1 to 5 stars, but the rating that gets displayed will actually have greater granularity than that. For instance, after multiple ratings a story could have an average of 3.78 out of 5.00 stars.

Sample of what the rater looks like

As usual, Internet Explorer is not as cooperative as Firefox (or even IE 7?)...I've tweaked it some already but it is still quirky. Firefox handles the star rater perfectly, but in IE you may notice you have to move your mouse off of the stars in order for it to clear whatever you had moused over (in Firefox you can freely move between stars and the correct number of stars is selected). Also I've had the issue a few times where once a story already has a rating, in IE you can't rate it lower than that rating. Again, in Firefox there is no problem. Let me know if you have issues and I'll see if I can play with it some more, but the fact that it is working well in Firefox has me tempted to leave it alone.

A reminder, there's 3 ways to get to old stories. The best way is via the "Topics" link in the top navigation bar where you can browse all stories by topic. You can view stories using the "Older Articles" link at the bottom of the main page. And lastly, you can use the random story option by clicking the dice image in the top navigation and get sent to a random story.