The “tag cloud”
I’ve been asked a particular question about the blog twice from two different brothers, so I figured I better respond on a broad scale.
Those annoyingly long and large words in the bottom corner of the sidebar on the right are part of a “tag cloud.” Each time I write a new post, I include “tags” that are relevant to the material within the post. You can see a list of tags for a particular post just under the header for the post. In turn, when I create these tags, they impact the “tag cloud” in the sidebar. The more I write about a particular subject that has been covered in a tag within the post, the larger the corresponding word gets in the tag cloud. In time, these can get rather large and even slip off into the dark edges of the blog where one can’t read the full tag. This can be a particularly annoying feature for those of us who deal with print publications layout – it just looks like sloppy formatting, but it’s really just a feature particular to blogging. Ironically, I learned the basics of blogging through the same graduate program that is training me to be a stickler when it comes to editing and publications layout. Nevertheless, this tag cloud serves as a tool for navigation through posts. When you select a hyperlink in the tag cloud, it will take you to all posts that have that particular tag. While I use a tag cloud, I opted not to include a category cloud – the two together in a blog can really get confusing.
Hope this helps. If there are any other questions, please feel free to ask.
This entry was posted on April 10, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Technical details about the blog. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: blog, blog design, blog format, blogging, category cloud, hyperlink, indexing, posts, sidebar, tag cloud, widgits
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