Schonhose

John Godley over at UrbanGiraffe.com has released the updated DrainHole plugin, which is compatible with WordPress 2.7. This means the downloads are up again! Happy leeching everyone!

At the end of November I blogged about my idea of taking 40 of the highest rated images and turning it into a book. In the post I have described a method for selecting the highest rated images but there were some flaws in my reasoning.

So I took another approach, which is much easier. Let’s assume everyone who has visited my photoblog has voted, but (and this is it) people who didn’t vote actually voted zero stars. In other words, they didn’t found the picture worth at least 1 star. When we assume this, the selection of the images becomes easier because now we only have to select the pictures with the highest total. But to narrow the selection a bit down I have included another rule: an image must have at least 5 votes to participate. Perhaps you’re wondering why I enforce this rule? The reason is quite simple. This way I know at least 5 people found the image good enough to give a rating between 1 – 5 stars.

Furthermore, whenever there is a situation in which two or more images have the same total rating the image with the least votes will be given the highest ranking.

For those of you wondering what the SQL looks like (you do need to have the AjaxRatings addon installed and I assume the prefix of the tables is “pixelpost_“) I have it included below. As can be seen I also let the statement I used earlier (weighted ratings) in the SQL for comparison:

SELECT
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value`,
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`headline`,
`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`body`, `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`image`,
((`total_rate`/5)*`total_votes`) as weighedRating
FROM `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`
WHERE `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`id` = `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`
ORDER BY `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value` DESC, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes` ASC
LIMIT 0,41


So, how does this look compared to my earlier approach? Well, the top 30 of my images stayed the same, some images shifted a bit but there were no real surprises. At the bottom of the list there were some small changes which has surprised me a bit. For instance: on number 37 (at the time of this post) was the Mosaic image I created containing the 200 images I had on my blog at that time. I’m not sure if I have a high resolution of the image lying around somewhere. In case I don’t I have chosen to omit this file.

Anyway, have a peek at the current output of the script.

At January 1st, 2009 I want to compile a list of images which have high ratings on my photoblog. The top 40 most rated images will be compiled into a real-life book.

However, compiling such a list proved to be a nice challenge based upon the information stored in the database. Currently all images have three types of statistics: Number of votes, Total rating and Averaged rating. In this case I couldn’t just sort on the Averaged rating, since images with only one vote but with a five star rating will float to the top. So basically I had to do something with the number of votes for each image.

Since the maximum rating for my blog is 5 stars I decided to divide each average rating by this maximum rating. The result is then multiplied by the number of votes. This will give a weighted rating based upon both the average rating and the number of votes.

Sorting on this results gives me a list of the top rated images which will be in a book after January 1st, 2009. Please vote for your favorite images over at my photoblog and see if your image makes it into the book.

Curious which images are currently in the book? Take a look at this crude and unstyled output of the top40 script.

If you like my photoblog (located at http://foto.schonhose.nl) then please vote for me over at Cool Photoblogs.

For your convenience I have included an image below, click this to vote.

If you want to see my profile and give me some cool points: click here for my profile.