Tag Cloud For My Blog

This morning’s entry on categories got me thinking and I decided to try generating a tag cloud based on the keywords I put on entries. Here is the result. I like it because it gives an immediate feel for which topics I spend the most time on. The cloud doesn’t show tags I used just once. To create the page, I followed Al-Muhajabah’s instructions with a few modifications.

• I’m careful to separate my tags by commas or whitespace, so I replaced

  $wordlist = preg_split(
    '/\s*[\s+\.|\?|,|(|)|\-+|\'|\"|=|;|×|\$|\/|:|{|}]\s*/i', 
    $string);
  

  with

  $wordlist = preg_split('/\s+|,/i',$string);
  

  The longer regexp was breaking things up more than I wanted and I was ending up with tags that weren’t tags I’d created.
• I modified some the font sizes to make them 25 points bigger all around. The smallest font wasn’t readable, at least in Firefox.
• I changed if ($count >= 1) to if ($count >= 2) on the grounds that if I’ve only used a tag once, it’s probably not all that important.
• Al-Muhajabah uses a SearchFields option in the search URL that doesn’t appear to be supported by MovableType. As an alternate, I used the SearchElement option which is supported, but not for keywords. I modified the _search_hit function in $MTHOME/lib/MT/App/Search.pm to support the keyword field like so:

  sub _search_hit {
    my($app, $entry) = @_;
    my @text_elements;
    if ($app->{searchparam}{SearchElement} ne 'comments') {
        @text_elements = 
            ($entry->title, $entry->text, $entry->text_more,
             $entry->keywords);
    }
    if ($app->{searchparam}{SearchElement} ne 'entries') {
        my $comments = $entry->comments;
        for my $comment (@$comments) {
            push @text_elements, 
                   $comment->text, $comment->author,
                   $comment->url;
        }
    }
    if ($app->{searchparam}{SearchElement} eq 'keywords') {
        @text_elements = ($entry->keywords);
    }
    return 1 
       if $app->is_a_match(
              join("\n", map $_ || '', @text_elements));
  }
  

This seems to work pretty well, giving the right results in the search. I’m going to monitor it for a while and eventually remove categories from my blog.

Posted by windley on March 14, 2006 11:59 AM