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+3 votes
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Not to flood the board with these threads, but surely this is useful.  Tag clouds should be sized logarithmically.  They should not be sized linearly.  To quote the blogger whose code I stole:

The reason why this is a poor choice to create a tag cloud is that tag frequency tends to not to be evenly distributed. Instead a few tags will usually have a very high frequency of use, and then it drops off rapidly. A tag cloud created using a tag frequency directly to determine font size will have a few tags that are very large, many tags that are very small, and almost nothing in between.

http://rhodopsin.blogspot.com/2008/05/php-tag-cloud.html

The difference can be seen between the latest addition to my q2a site (yes, a logarithmic tag cloud plugin) and the original (linear) q2a tag cloud plugin:

The top cloud is linear, the bottom is logarithmic.  The bottom also is specifying a minimum font size, which helps keep the text readable.  This is what this new plugin does.  Oh, and it also allows you to sort the tags alphabetically (on by default):

Well, you get the idea.  With lots of tags, the lower cloud looks a lot nicer, imo.

Source is here:

https://github.com/NoahY/q2a-log-tags

EDIT: And here's the new admin interface:

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I tried installing this but nothing shows up in the admin section. Nothing in admin/plugins or admin/layout. Any ideas?
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It shows up here... maybe I've broken something... any error log?
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Hi

Noahy please mention do I need to uninstall tag cloud plugin before installing the q2a log tags plugin
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no they are two different widgets.
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Thanks, can we show tag counts by using q2a log tag plugin like stackoverflow

2 Answers

+1 vote
by

OK I figured out my problem, the "log-tag-cloud" folder had incorrect permissions on it for some reason. Once I fixed that it started working straight away - however, I did then get some errors in the error.log.

For example when loading /questions (coming from /questions?sort=views):
    [Thu Aug 18 12:41:03 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Most popular tags, referer: http://localhost/pokebase/questions?sort=views
Running on localhost, Ubuntu 11.04. Any ideas what the problem might be?

Anyway, it all works great on the front end. Much better than the default tag cloud plugin (sorry gideon) ;) Excellent work!

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:) just a left over debug log... I never notice them because I have error display turned off and just use the error log for debugging.  Gone now, anyway, thanks for reporting it.
0 votes
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hello noahy me again xD , i have a problem with tag-log last version, in my global server with php 5.2.17

Warning: max() [function.max]: Array must contain at least one element in /homepages/19/d378890519/htdocs/qs/qa-plugin/noahyq2a-tag-log/qa-tag-cloud.php on line 207

Warning: min() [function.min]: Array must contain at least one element in /homepages/19/d378890519/htdocs/qs/qa-plugin/noahyq2a-tag-log/qa-tag-cloud.php on line 208

any idea?

thanks

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It must mean you have no popular tags... fixed now, so it will commit suicide if there are no tags in the list.
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xDD sorry, its fresh install no tags, no categories xD
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no tags = no cloud :)
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