Hi all,
    You might noticed that we now have a “Tag Cloud” on our sidebar. For the newbies, a tag cloud is a randomised display of tags(or commonly used words in your site) with the most popular displayed most prominantly, and the prominance decreasing with popularity.

    If you want a tag cloud, such as this one as demostrated on our page, theres a cool Wordpress plugin available. Cloudy coded by Chris is one of the most useful little plugins available for Wordpress blogs.

    Cloudy gives you the ability to make a tag cloud and adjust its options (sizes, word lengths, excluded words(all commonly used words are excluded automatically), colours, justification and so on… ).

    Installing Cloudy is quite simple. Download the ZIP file from the author’s blog. Unzip it into your Wordpress/plugins directory. Enable the plugin “Cloudy” from your Wordpress Plugins panel, and add a line of code(given below) in your  theme’s “sidebar.php” where ever you want the cloud to appear -

<?php
$myCloudy = new cloudy();
$myCloudy->print_cloudy();
?>

    Voila! You have your simple tag cloud for Wordpress set up Cloudy scans through your entire blog, and show up words which appear maximum number of times Handy eh?

    Now, there ARE other methods to make tag clouds.

• To make your OWN tag cloud, check out the Phraction blog. Not reccomended for beginners.
• You might want to look into Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin along with its manual(”UTW for dummies” by Lorelle) if you want advanced options. This one is quite powerful and customisable, but then, I never got it to work on my blog. I wouldnt reccomend this for beginners. But UTW combines many features, like bookmarking, feeds, tags, site search tags, technorati tags, and tag clouds. I use different plugins, and a few edits of my own, for each of these features.
• If you have the “Jerome’s Keywords” plugin installed, then there is yet another easy way to create a tag cloud. ChipsTips has a great plugin to create a tag cloud easily IF YOU HAVE JEROME’S KEYWORDS INSTALLED.

Well, these are the more popular and easier methods for a tag cloud of Wordpress. Cheerios for now

Technorati Tags: tag, cloud, tag cloud, simple, Cloudy, UTW