Building tag cloud can be a very interesting job. There is so many aspects that have to be considered to build a good tag cloud, since tag cloud isn’t intended to make people become more confused.
At the very first beginning, we can take a very simple tag cloud. The specifications of this very simple tag cloud are straightforward:
- There are x degrees of font size
So, for an input of list of tags and list of tag occurences, we have to find the maximum value and minimum value of tag occurence. This value will then be substracted and the result will be divided by x, our font size degrees.
Based on the result we can divide the original list of tags into x category and render the tag cloud into the screen. Isn’t it easy?
You will be quite happy with the result… And as you may recognize, most of tag cloud is built with this algorithm.
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Another guy has also do the discovery of the perfect tag cloud. Read his experience here.
Since I posted quite a broad range of subjects (well, trading mostly — but alot of stocks), most of my tag clouds have the same size! It’s really not a beauty to watch
That’s one of the reasons why tag cloud is hard… we need some optimizations for such cases. Just like in trading, such information can’t give us a clue about our next step.