A Very Nice Way To Display Your Tag Cloud
I recently came upon a WordPress plugin which I couldn’t keep from installing on my blog. If you look at my sidebar, you will see it at work. It’s called the wp-cumulus. It puts the tags in your WordPress blog (and categories too) in a nice animated cloud. Here’s what it looks like:
However, this screenshot doesn’t do it justice. To see it in action, just hover your mouse over the tag cloud in my sidebar.
As you will notice, it immediately starts rotating in the direction that your mouse is in. All the tags on the blog come and go from view, and you can hover your mouse over a particular tag and click it to see all posts from that tag.
There are a bunch of configuration options that you can use to fine tune the look and feel as well as the behavior of the tag cloud. I think this is absolutely one of those plugins that you got to have on your blog if you have a tag cloud.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 29th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I had this plugin on my blog, but now went back to the old text based cloud. One problem I faced was it’s too small. For a sidebar implementation at least.
Most of my tags were “hidden” behind the sphere
When there are text tags, all are upfront so people can quickly browse through. Here it’s more of an exploratory interaction. It’s cool, but require effort. So if someone is not looking for a tag, s/he is less likely to use it, as opposed to text tags, where everything is upfront and that too in variable sizes of popularity.
Just my opinion obviously….
September 29th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
@Saad – your blog is actually where I saw this. I agree with you and that is why I have both my Tag Clouds in the Side Bar
September 29th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Yup. Seems like a good implementation.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
yep it does look really cool, but search engines are going to have a hard time following those links in a flash plugin. So it would seem advisable to have the old cloud in there too – like you do! Nice effect though!!
October 7th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Yep, from the SEO perspective, its useless. But it looks so cool
October 16th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Well this is a wonderful plugin.I have also came accross this in Blogger.Blogger also have this widget!
October 16th, 2008 at 7:40 am
I’ve used Cumulus before and found it was a fun way to display my tags. However, I like to keep things simple so I went back to my default tag plugin on WordPress.
October 16th, 2008 at 9:25 am
@Allan – I guess its one of those things that makes your blog a little different from time to time.
I am sure there will be a point where I will also remove it.
Till then, it is really cool.