Astute observers of sparkplug9.com will have noticed that Zoomclouds, announced with such frisson merely a week ago, is toast.
Zoomclouds offers a very simple way to add tag clouds to blogs. Since, of course, no self-respecting hip web 2-ish blogger would be caught in a coffee-bar without a tag cloud, I had to have one too. Keeping up with the Joneses, you know.
However, Zoomclouds (among its other lamentable failings) had two fatal flaws:
- it only indexed a tiny fraction of my content
- it thought everything was a tag, including sea gull
Yes, sea gull. Not cool. Not cool at all. Not even slightly hip. Rather Fisherman’s Friend gauche, actually. So Zoomclouds had to go.
Luckily, my fragile sense of blogging panache was bolstered by the concurrent sighting of Zak Greant’s Category Cloud. Instant image restoration!
Category Cloud, unfortunately, is not a final solution. Sadly, it’s a chimera: the tags it displays are not tags at all, but simply – as the name suggests – categories masquerading as tags.
Which means it works great for bloggers like me, who have hundreds of hideously old-fashioned un-tagged posts. A better solution will have to wait until WordPress supports tagging and tag clouds natively.
Until that day: long live categories! (And category clouds.)
If you don’t like “sea gull” as a tag, you could have added it in ZoomClouds as an “unwanted tag”. See? We all take our time to “tag” our posts, but expect that a “tag cloud service” do everything for ourselves, and perhaps that’s not feasible, at least not with 100% accuracy.
And about indexing only a portion of your content, well, it takes into consideration whatever it finds in your RSS feed, so yes, unless you innitially provide an RSS feed with all your previous posts, it will only consider whatever content you add since the day you place the cloud in your site.
Hi Mike,
I just posted an updated version at http://zak.greant.com/wordpress-cat-cloud-plugin-v022-released
Cheers!
–zak