Solo Technology

After a tip from rich, I had a look at TagCloud this morning. Remind me to add “beta” to my site somewhere.

So what is TagCloud? From their About page:

What is this thing?

A working product showing off the cool stuff that can happen when folks, in this case Yahoo! opens up content and services for a developer to use in his own applications. Folksonomies & Tagging are all the rage lately (See Flickr and del.icio.us for the most popular examples), so we thought it would be fun to see what happens when you automate the process.

Now, we’ve made it freely available for you to plug into your website or link to.

Truly cool feature? Once I’ve defined a cloud, I can grab a bit of HTML from them and (apparently) easily add it to a site. So, for instance, I’ll have a tag cloud on my static Pocket PC page that will always be somewhat current. How do I know it’ll be somewhat current? Because that tag cloud’s feed will be from my blinklist account: http://www.blinklist.com/HandySolo/pocketpc/rss.xml. Golly, but that’s kind of clever, no?

Alas, they apparently don’t update clouds on the fly, so I don’t have anything to show yet… but I’m hoping this will be cooler than the other side of the pillow. The static link to my test cloud will be: http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/Blink_PPC/default/50. Hopefully I’ll have more luck than Rich has so far.

Anywho, the concept may or may not make sense, but since I haven’t yet seen an obvious way to get just the cloud from a social bookmarking site onto my own pages, it seems that TagCloud.com might be the trick.

6 Responses to “Keep static pages dynamic?”

1. Rich G. on January 22nd, 2006 9:18 am
   

   I’m more than a little disheartened by tagcloud’s slow clouding… I think maybe it’s alpha, and not beta.

2. Rich G. on January 22nd, 2006 9:38 am
   

   http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
   is what I’m doing right now.

   It will add a tag cloud to, in my case, the top of my site. You can put it anywhere. It’s just a single line of php code.

   So now you’re tag-independant. I knew such a thing had to exist.

   You can thank me with gifts of money. *grin*

3. chris on January 22nd, 2006 10:08 am
   

   I’m a total chimp too. I just saw that BlinkList has the ability to do give me a cloud on my own pages too.

   Blinklist Syndication

   





   I’ll try that today.

4. chris on January 22nd, 2006 10:12 am
   

   Oops. Still a chimp. That code just gets me the list of blink’d links. Not the tag cloud. Hmmm…

5. Rich G. on January 22nd, 2006 10:48 am
   

   I can’t believe you haven’t parlezed your long-tail into pull to get that feature added yet.

6. chris on January 22nd, 2006 2:36 pm
   

   While I love the concept of “The long tail”, I’ll be the first to admit that my little tuft is WAY too far the right to be of much practical use. :p

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