On a never-ending quest to find useful “extras” for my Blogs and websites, I looked into Tag Clouds earlier this week. You’ll probably have seen them on swanky Web 2.0 sites – groups of seemingly random words of different font sizes. You click on a word to read more on the subject.

These tag clouds are picking words from news feeds and the like, and the words are weighted depending on their use, hence the font sizes.

A quick search of Google immediately showed a free service for bloggers and website owners… ZoomClouds.

Setting up was easy – simply supplying a news feed and a few titles. From here, ZoomClouds goes away and creates the appropriate tags. The site suggests this should take mere seconds, but I found this not to be the case. I left them for a few hours before returning.

At this stage you can now create your design – how the tags will be displayed, including choices of colours, tagcloud width, number of tags, etc. All very easy, and you can even allow your design to be made public for others to use.

They supply the code which you can add to your website and Blog.

This is where I came across my second problem. What they show you your Tag Cloud should look like is not what they’re then looking like on the Blog/website. I first put one on the BMTG site and the colours were limited – you get to choose 4, but it only seemed to be showing 2. After a bit of digging on the ZoomClouds site, I came across a way to make the colours random, which gave a much better result. However, my second Tag Cloud, which I put on my Blog, showed a limited range of font sizes. Now, both of these may be due to a lack of range between the various words, so as most are equally weighted they’re the same size and colour. But just in case I’ve contacted ZoomClouds and posed them this question. I’ll post back when I get a reply.

Anyway, they still look pretty good, and the information they provide is rather handy.

Update 24/01/2008 – Now that I’ve switched to using WordPress, which has built-in tag cloud facilities, I don’t use ZoomCloud.

No, not this time.

But I’ve noticed that I mentioned some time ago about using new Captcha software. Well, after some head scratching (explained in a bit) I’ve got it up and working on the BMTG site.

Scratching, because it refused to work. In the end it turned out that another piece of code was interfering with it. I used the least elegant solution to the problem (rather than getting them to work in harmony, I simply turned the other code off on the pages that needed the captcha) and all is well.

It might be worth taking a while to peruse the BMTG site whilst you’re there as I’ve recently made LOTS of changes to it. These include…

• Removed a menu system that I was trialling (it had drop-down sub-options) and have instead implemented a simple single menu, but where options lead to screens with further sub-options on.
• Good use of iconography on screens
• The front page is now delivered via a back-end MySQL database
• Top-of-page adverts are also now delivered from a MySQL database
• Various page tidies
• Completely re-validated all the pages, checked links, checked across browsers, etc, etc.

Not bad. Even if I do say so myself!