Solo Technology

The folks at ZoomClouds.com got some press recently, so today I meandered over to have a look. Reminds me a lot of tagclouds.com, but this one actually produces a cloud! So yeah, I immediately updated “The Tags” page…

My initial cloud is based from this blog’s RSS feed and, in theory, will keep tags around for 30 days. In other words, that cloud should more or less represent what I’ve written about for the last 30 days. Well, once I get more feeds to it, of course. Click a tag and you get sent to ZoomClouds’ site and see a list of corresponding articles. Click an article and you’re sent back here to read it. All nice and crispy.

I’m a bit fuzzy still on what they use to look over an article and derive tags… that’s my polite way of saying, “Where’s all my tags!” [updated: tons of tags there now!] They must not, for instance, pick up the tags I’m already assigning. In reading over the FAQ, it looks like there’s a fair amount of, for lack of a better term, repeat analysis happening though so we’ll see how this pans out over time.

Adding it to the blog was pretty straightforward, but I did deviate a bit from the instructions. Once chunk of code they want inserted into the page showing the cloud between the .. tags. In looking it over, I realized it was just the style gunk, so I just put that stuff in my theme’s style sheet instead. Seems to work fine and doesn’t impact anything else there so what the heck. The cloud itself is produced via the usual javascript call.

Now, to wait and see if they can keep up with the load.

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