Logarithmic Tag Cloud Plugin, Anyone?

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 07:25:26 +0000

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:

Question2Answer Q&A - Recent questions tagged logarithmic

Logarithmic Tag Cloud Plugin, Anyone?