review

From IndieWeb

A review is a post evaluating a product, service, or experience, usually involving a written description, sometimes with summary numerical evaluations, also known as just a rating if it’s just a single numerical value or iconic representation like stars (★★★★☆).

Why

You should own your reviews, just like you own your comments.

How to

How to publish

Current review publishing best practice is to post an h-review as you would otherwise post an h-entry.

(markup example needed!)

IndieWeb Examples

Tantek

Tantek Çelik has occassionally manually posted reviews since at least 2006-07-18, e.g.:

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki has posted a review as a note, without explicit h-review markup: http://aaronparecki.com/notes/2015/06/23/1/echo

Since 2019-10-06, Aaron Parecki has also posted "tips" on his site syndicated to Foursquare

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill has posted reviews with h-review markup as of 2017-04-02.

A more recent example of a book review:

My intent was initially to post a recipe with a link to Blue Apron recipes I've enjoyed, then I realized it was easy to wrap in an h-review at the same time:

Previously I had posted a review as an article, without explicit h-review markup:

Christian Weiske

Christian Weiske has posted reviews with Microformats 1 hreview classes

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich has been posting reviews since at least 2018-12-30:

Dan Q

Dan Q added h-review reviews to his site in 2019, retroactively PESOS-importing reviews from several silos, e.g.:

Shane Becker

Shane Becker has posted reviews as articles, without explicit h-review markup:

Kelson Vibber

Kelson Vibber has been consolidating reviews from his blog(s) and various silos such as Amazon, Yelp, and even Google+. Since 2021 the reviews section of his website uses h-review and microformat-enabled ratings, and (manually) POSSEs out new posts to silos.

Brian Tremblay

Brian Tremblay publishes music reviews on his site:

Add yourself!

Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Past Examples

The following examples are offline. Please help restore their links with Internet Archive links for historical purposes!

Kyle Mahan

Kyle's site is now unfortunately a zombie site, so links have been replaced with archived versions

Kyle Mahan has posted reviews with explicit h-review markup

Silo Examples

Amazon

Main article: Amazon Reviews

Amazon is a review and ratings silo of sorts, in that they have a UI for creating reviews/ratings and host them on their own site.

Goodreads

Main article: Goodreads

Goodreads is a silo for keeping track of books, reviews, and reading progress. Amazon purchased Goodreads in 2013.

Yelp

Main article: Yelp

Yelp is a review silo that also allows for checkins.

AirBnB

Main article: AirBnB Reviews

AirBnB also hosts reviews in addition to its primary use-case.

Letterboxd

Main article: Letterboxd

Letterboxd is a silo for keeping track of films and reviews in what they call a "film diary".

IMDB

IMDb is a large film and television database and silo that allows for rating content, writing reviews, creating watchlists, and adding media checkins among other functionalities.

GitHub

GitHub allows posting of reviews as a response to a pull request. E.g.

When you're looking at a pull request on GitHub, the Files changed tab in particular, there's a "Review changes" drop-down in the topright of the view of the diffs.

Clicking it shows:

  • "Review summary" text field,
  • as well as radio group for
    • ( ) Comment
    • ( ) Approve
    • ( ) Request changes, and then
  • a "Submit review" button

Google Maps ("Google Places")

Reviews posted about places registered on Google My Business appear on Google Maps, via their app, etc. They have individual URLs which could be useful for syndication, e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/103645469476905576119/place/ChIJlYd0JcPEdkgRua5jm4pBRBA. Being as they're reviews of businesses with real locations, reviews of this kind might benefit from h-card metadata.

Additional details about Google Reviews and their system: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6230175

Brainstorming

POSSE to GitHub

It would be great to be able to post a review of a pull request to my own site, and POSSE it to GitHub, though this requires at a minimum marking up:

  • review summary/content - which h-review (and h-entry for that matter) already supports
  • choice of comment/approve/request changes
    • "comment" could just be the silent default - no other markup needed. just an h-review with content should work to make this work.
    • "approve" needs some explicit indication.
      • use a tag? <span class="p-category">approve</span>
      • similarly: <span class="p-category">changes</span> for request changes
      • or a custom rating field per h-review?
      • or ... ?

Next steps:

  • figure out some markup (perhaps gather at least one more silo example for which the markup would make sense)
  • experiment with a manual pull request review on an indieweb site
  • experiment with manually POSSEing it to GitHub
  • file an issue on Bridgy Publish to support POSSEing h-review posts of GitHub pull request URLs. Or perhaps allow minimum viable comment + special-tags for Bridgy to detect. Or encourage / allow both? (why? why not just use the minimum makrup that would work?)

See Also