Rob A's (Im)personal Blog

Tag Cloud

While surfing about the net I ran across a nifty tag cloud implemented as a flash movie, WP-Cumulus. Unfortunately, it was a wordpress plugin^[?]. Fortunately the creator, Roy Tanck, was kind enough to not only open source WP-Cumulus, but to provide tips on how to incorporate it into other web sites!

I tossed out the idea in the S9Y forum and had some interest, especially once I discovered it used the SWFObject javascript which, according to the creator,

is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

So I hacked it into my local blog (sorry for the down time ) and got it working with hard-coded parameters, then migrated it into the freetag plugin that Serendipity has. Garvin (the creator of S9Y) made a few improvements, and it is now bundled into the application, and available via Sparticus, the S9Y online plugin manager!)