I want to be able to write some reviews and graph­i­cal­ly rate them with stars. I put together some trans­par­ent stars in Gimp and added a macro to dasBlog.

I’m going to rate this effort:

$stars(4.5)

To get this effect, I simply wrote $stars(4.5).

(And I had to carefully construct the previous sentence so that dasBlog wouldn’t invoke the stars macro.)

I’m hardnosed. I rarely give 5/5 to anything. I don’t really expect to need the half stars, but I may want that fine control at some point.

To use this in your own blog, download the zipfile of star images.

Copy 5star*.gif to your blog’s images directory. The *.xcf files are Gimp source files.

Add the following line to the <Con­tent­Fil­ters> section of your blog’s site.config:

<ContentFilter
  find="\$stars\((?&lt;expr&gt;[\d.]+)\)"
  replace="&lt;div&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;images/5star${expr}.gif&quot; /&gt; ${expr} stars out of 5&lt;/div&gt;"
  isregex="true" />

Enjoy!