Wordpress Widget

An automatic Tag Cloud for your Wordpress.com blog? Easy. Right widget

Wordpress.com does not support third-party flash widgets like ours (see left), but it will allow you to add a text box, with a little piece of code. (see how here) If you want super-quick automatic tags based on the content of your page, just add a text widget to your Wordpress.com blog, and add the following code: <a href="http://linkky.com/wp"><img src="http://tinyurl.com/quickwidget"></a>
That will read your page, and put you a nice visual tag cloud together. The first time will take a short while, as it has to go and read your page. Then it caches the image for about an hour, when it will update on the page load. There is an example at MyMission2's blog.

Something more special?

Why not have a widget image that is more in keeping with your page? You can customise the image below. If you want to, you can tag different pages or Twitter stream, and have them appear on your blog.

We have an example below that uses the BBC News site and Stephen Fry's Twitter stream all mashed up. Play around with the look and feel, and when you are happy, click "Get a TinyUrl for your blog". Make sure to click "Clear All" if you want a widget image that will tag your own blog. Don't worry, there is a warning screen in case you forget.

Main widget
 




Background Color
Text Color

What is this

Essentially, we are trying to do two things. The first is to extract important themes from all of the web pages or Twitter feeds specified. Some may be common to all, and some may be unique.

Then we present this back in a very visual form. We have different versions of the product, and the technology has now been incorporated into the JumpTo product set. This is the most basic form, just a static image.

How can I manipulate the tags I see?

Width

Fairly self-explanatory

Heading

Leave it as "none", if you want nothing no heading. At the moment, it does not look great in the image version

Pick a URL or Twitter ID

Make sure that any URL is preceded by http:// or https://. Click "Add More?" if you need more space for urls, or Twitter ID's. If you want to tag only the page the image appears on, click "Clear All".

Font Size (px)

Pick the font size for your smallest tag

Tag size increase (px)

There are 14 potential sizes for tag, and this dictates the increase between each, starting from Font Size

Maximum number of results

Too many, and it clogs the screen. If you are brave, set it to 0 for unlimited

Filter level

This is a "noise" filter, which determines the type of tags you will get. It's best to fiddle with this a bit to get the type of results you are after

Colors

These determine the look and feel of the widget

I'm finding it a bit slow

There are a lot of factors at work here. We cache as much as we can, but a lot of processing is performed live. Partly it relates to the speed at which we can retrieve the URL's you put in. The image rendering and text analysis are both highly processer intensive even in a multi-server environment..

If you put a widget on your site, we cache it for about an hour, so no-one waits too long to see the end result. Future (probably paid) enhancements will call the page regularly to a) see if there have been any updates, and b) to ensure that the image is always up-to-date so there is no delay in rendering.