Create A Tag Cloud Based On The Content of Your Blog or Website
Tag Clouds, you have seen them on delicious, Technorati or Flickr, are an easy way to get people explore your site deeper. Here's a sample tag cloud that uses Google AJAX Search.
Tag Clouds (provided they are not cluttered and display just the relevant words) help visitors quickly visualize what your website is all about since the topics you frequently cover are mentioned in bold or relatively bigger fonts.
WordPress community already offers some excellent plugins for generating tag clouds (like the Ultimate Warrior) plus the upcoming release, WP 2.3, has inbuilt support for tagging.
However, if you are on Blogger or have a non-blog website, there's no reason that you should miss Tag Clouds.
Here's how to add a good looking tag cloud to your Blogger blog:
1. Type your Blogger feed address in RainMaker
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xyz/posts/default?max-results=999
Remember to replace xyz with your Blog ID. This URL will retrieve your latest 999 posts and supply that for analysis to RainMaker.
2. For the word link, type the following (where xxx is your blog name, e.g. labnol)
http://xxx.blogspot.com/search?q=%%enc_word%%
3. You can change the default font size, tag cloud dimension background image and colors to fit your site theme.
4. Now the tricky part. Once you have generated the tag cloud using RainMaker, right click over your tag cloud and click "View HTML source" - that the code you need to copy paste in your site.
Tip for Tag Clouds - If you really want visitors to spend more time on your site via Tag Clouds, always keep the number of words in Tag Cloud to an absolute minimum and that there is sufficient space around each word.
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Reader Comments:
Thanks was looking for Tag Cloud madly for last couple of days but NO success yet, I had posted a post on my Blog re: Labnol and accepted the fact that this Blog / YOU are my 'Guru, I am from M.Nagar, near Roorkee, you might know : )
Cheers!
Amit, though it's a nice feature, there are some points to ponder:-
1) Just copy-paste the code means it will create static tag cloud. It will not update if your content changes.
2) For word link, is using url for custom search (with AdSense enabled) legal? because it will help to monetize this tag cloud.
hey Amit, thanks for info, i've 1 more question do you know how to Add the 'Previous posts' Link to the end of page, This i believe will keep reader digging deep into you old articles.
Amit,
A similar enhancement is offered by
ZoomClouds.
I have used del.icio.us to create tag cloud in my blog:
- I have created a user with username: gialloporporablog
2) I have added all my post to del.icio.us user and tagged it
3) I have generated the tag cloud for this user
It's true this thing can be done only if you have only few post in a blog, I have started to tag theme when I have 20 post on my blog.
I think that is possible to use del.icio.us API to automate the process.
Hi Amit,
The example you give only covers blogspot hosted blogs - my blog for example is hosted on my domain. I know the feed address for the first step, but if you host your blog yourself and switch off the navbar, is there a way to harness Blogger search to keep people on your blog when they click on a tag in the cloud, rather than have to default to Google?
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