JS-Kit

JS-Kit is a suite of tools including comments, rating and poll widgets which can be embedded in a website to provide interactivity.

If you want to add a comment or ratings feature to a website often you need to build it into the website itself - which can be a laborious process.

JS-Kit provides a third-party comment, ratings and poll service - which you can embed into any website which you control with just a few lines of javascript code.

With JS-Kit you can easily invite 5-Star ratings, and in-depth comments, on services, activities or consultation questions.

You will need to be able to embed Javascript into the website you are adding ratings or comments to. This should be possible on most self-built and self-hosted websites, but may not be possible if your site is based around a free service like Wordpress.com.

1. You will need an account with JS-Kit. Visit http://js-kit.com/settings/ and choose to log-in with a 'New JS-Kit Account' to create a username and password.
2. Once you have registered you will be presented with a site management page. Enter the address of the website on which you wish to add ratings or comments.
3. You will then be given Javascript code from the 'Install' tab which you can use to add ratings or comments to your web pages.

If you are using a content management system for your website and you are able to edit (or ask someone else to edit) the template files it uses, then you can embed the rating code into the templates. Otherwise you will need to paste it onto each page where you want comments or ratings.

You can return to http://js-kit.com/settings/ at any time to log-in and review your settings for comments and ratings.

In particular you can choose whether users should be allowed to log-in to leave comments using their Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter accounts - and whether users are allowed to add images and create user profiles against their comments.

You can also visit http://js-kit.com/moderate/ to choose whether comments on your site will be pre-moderated, or post-moderated, and to set up word-filter for bad language.

In your settings you can choose to get e-mail alerts whenever new comments are added.

If you have chosen pre-moderation of comments, then you will need to make sure you can moderate comments at least daily.

You will also need to think about how you can respond to comments effectively.

From the settings page of JS-Kit you will find tools to export all the comments you have received.

ToDo: Get details of exporting rating data.

Because JS-Kit provides comment boxes and ratings widgets using Javascript some older web-browsers, or users with screen readers may not be able to access these feedback features.

You should consider providing a way for users to offer their feedback by e-mail or phone - with you either manually adding the comments and rating to your website, or feeding them directly into your engagement process.

You can do this using the <noscript></noscript> html tags. Anything put between these tags will only be shown on a web-browser which does not have javascript enabled.

For example, you might replace the standard rating embed code with:

<div class="js-kit-ratings" title="" permalink=""></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script> 
<noscript>We would love your feedback on this service. You can e-mail feedback@ourservice.com or call 0111 234 567 to leave a voicemail with your comments. Don't forget to mention which service your comments are about.
</noscript>

Anyone with Javascript enabled will see the ratings form. Anyone without will see/hear your message.

JS-Kit is a third-party service. Paid JS-Kit plans offer a Service Level Agreement But as with all third party services you should be sure to regularly take a backup of your data.

JS-Kit is very flexible. You can customise the design of all the widgets they provide using CSS, and you can gain access to an API to integrate the service more closely with your website. See the JS-Kit Wiki and customisation details on the product pages for details.

JS-Kit also provides a Navigator widget which can be used on the front-page or in the side-bar of a website to showcase recent comments and high-rated pages on a site.

You can get an RSS feed of comments for each of the pages where you have JS-Kit Comments embedded.

The format is: http://js-kit.com/rss/domain-name.tld/path

For example, comments on this page are available in an RSS feed here:

http://js-kit.com/rss/practicalparticipation.co.uk/tools/lgiu/wiki/guide:toolbox:js-kit

You can use this to monitor comments on a given page using a listening dashboard.

JS-Kit includes a ratings widget. By default the rating will be for the page on which the widget is embedded - so it works well when you have one page per 'thing' to be rated. However, you can also have multiple ratings per page, or the same rating on multiple pages. Details in the FAQ

JS-Kit provides a comments widget to add comments to any page. The comment system includes features for:

• Pre and post-moderation
• Bad-word filters
• SPAM Filtering
• Users to log-in via Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo accounts
• Rich-text comments
• E-mail notification and follow up
• Export of comments

And more.

JS-Kit provides a feature for running polls.