I’ve been trying to figure out how to handle “rating” different bars.

The end goal is have a very drilled down rating system whereby a user could see all of the top-rated sports bars; the top-rated beer bars; the cheapest bar with a good singles scene; etc.

My initial implementation was to have four fixed rating types using an AJAX “Star Rater”. (an ajax star rater is what sites like Netflix and Ajaxian use) I found a couple premade scripts, but ended up throwing them away and coming up with my own. You can see it in action on any location detail page

The problem is, different ratings only make sense for certain bars. IE Monk’s Is a belgian beer bar… it does really make sense to have a rating for “Dancing”. (in a different sense it actually does, the rating should be “n/a”)

My solution was to set it up such that bars have a many-to-many relationship with rating types. For instance now Finnigans Wake can have a “Dancing” rating and Monks can have a “Beer Bar” rating.

We’ll see how this pans out. Currently I have 22 different rating types. Putting all of these on one page would be way too cluttered. But I still need to figure out a way to present to the user why certain ratings only apply to certain bars.

Ok its 10:45, Thursday night, and I think I need to go do some “research” :D