My Own Tag Cloud (Now With Links)

I've been working on my tag cloud script. Each of the tag words now has a dynamic layer associated with it which contains a list of hypertext links for all of the blog posts that have that tag.

I tried munging the output generated by the new version of the Python script (you'll need the JavaScript file too), so that it'll fit in a paragraph below. That seemed to blow roller's mind, (with some really weird formatting), so I've made it available via this link. It's also down in the miscellaneous section at the bottom of the right sidebar.

When you are over the tag you are interested in, click on it and a layer will appear containing links to all of my blog posts that have this Technorati tag in them.

There's still a few problems I need to fixup. (I'm still learning how this code works). For example, if not all the links are showing, you will need to use the keyboard arrow keys to bring the rest of the layer onto the screen.

Also note that currently the best I can do is provide a link to the day that that blog post was posted. If there was only one post per day then that's fine, but otherwise you'll have to possibly scroll down to find the relevant one. I'm working with Dave Johnson to hopefully improve this.

I've noticed that my previous tag cloud didn't show up correctly when I looked at it at BlogLines. I'm guessing they are striping out some of the HTML tags as they repost them. To get the best effect, you've have to look at the tag cloud directly from my blog.

The JavaScript code at the heart of this (which I've reformatted and hacked on a bit), came from a co-worker who thinks it originally came from a DHTML tips website. If anybody knows exactly where this originally came from, please let me know as I'd like to give credit to the appropriate people.

In the process of doing all of this, I also found a couple of my tags that were incorrectly spelt and fixed them up.

The next task is to improve the CSS to make the tag cloud appearance (and the popup link layer) look better and to improve the JavaScript so that the layer appears on the screen without having to scroll using the keyboard arrow keys and doesn't go away at inappropriate times (such as when you move the mouse out of it).

Hopefully there will be another version in the future that makes all of those changes.

[Technorati Tag: Tags]

[Technorati Tag: Blog]

[Technorati Tag: Tag Cloud]

( Feb 09 2006, 12:25:26 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink