Tag Clouds
A colleague of mine sent me the link to a fantastic movable type plugin called CloudCreator. Once installed, it transformed my category list into a tag cloud, ala del.icio.us and flickr. You can see it on my sidebar. I had to tweak the default look a bit as you’ll see below.
Using this simple default markup,
<div class="blogs-module module">
<h2 class="module-header">Tags</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<MTCatCloud all="1">
<span style="<$MTCatCloudCSS$>"><$MTCatCloudName$></span>
</MTCatCloud>
</div>
</div>
CloudCreator creates a tag cloud like so:
The problem was that the tag labels weren’t links. So, I hacked up the markup as best I knew how as follows:
<div class="blogs-module module">
<h2 class="module-header">Tags</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<MTCatCloud all="1">
<span style="<$MTCatCloudCSS$>"><a href="http://www.primordia.com/blog/archives/<$MTCatCloudName$>/"><$MTCatCloudName$>>
</MTCatCloud>
</div>
</div>
This yielded a kind of ugly-looking underlined-link scenario as follows:
Modifying the markup one last time as follows:
<div class="blogs-module module">
<h2 class="module-header">Tags</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<MTCatCloud all="1">
<span style="<$MTCatCloudCSS$>"<a style=";text-decoration: none" href="http://www.primordia.com/blog/archives/<$MTCatCloudName$>/"><$MTCatCloudName$>>
</MTCatCloud>
</div>
</div>
Yielded the final look. The default stylesheet for my site “highlights” links in a lighter color when you hover over them. In this case, my mouse was over “general”:
Also, as a consequence of adding this capability I have added a bunch more categories, er tags, to my blog:
science, illustration, photography, web2.0, and tagging.
At some point I’ll go through all of my entries and re-assign tags for a better, more tagged, collection of posts. That process will likely be very tediuous so I hope there’s a good tool out there to help me do it.
Oh, and say goodbye to this old clunker!
