Aug 11, 2009

Label Clouds In Blogger

It has been a while since I've given label clouds for Blogger much thought. They seem to have gone by wayside in blog design, but I'm still rocking one on my blog. I like that it helps minimize the amount of scrolling that's needed to navigate a blog.

Yesterday, the blogger at www.campfireplace.com contacted me to ask if I knew of a simple way to add a label cloud to Blogger. I got my label cloud up on my blog by following the tutorial by phydeaux3 a couple of years ago. You can find his hack for label clouds in Blogger copied and reproduced all over the place but that's where it originated. It isn't as complicated as it may appear when you first read it, if I could do it, you can too. If you don't feel comfortable editing your template try it out on a test blog before you do it on your live blog and remember to backup your Blogger template before doing any modifications in case you make a mistake.

If you're not up for the challenge of modifying your blogger template the easiest option I can recommend is registering at Delicious and bookmarking all of your posts and exporting the tag cloud code there. If your blog has a hefty archive this may take a while, but you could just tag your favorites or most popular posts. If your blog is relatively new then this should only take you a matter of minutes. Once you've bookmarked your posts on Delicious simply go to Settings scroll down to Blogging and click on Tag Rolls. You'll be presented with a tag cloud generator where you can do some customizations, when you're done simply copy the code and place it in the HTML/Java Script gadget of your choice.

Update: Blogger just announced official support for Label Clouds.

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3 comments:

  1. I had long wished for a Cloud. I went where you said, Phydeaux3 and carefully followed the instructions, even to backing up my template, which I usually just skip over. Success on the first try! I love it.

    You are right, it beats that single list of Labels that I put at the end of my blog instead of the sidebar because it was so very long, in case somebody wanted to find Strobilanthes or Epiphyllum or some other exotic, or even Zinnias. Better than a search feature because sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you see it. Browsing a cloud is better.

    Thanks for the tip.
    ReplyDelete
  2. Nell Jean,

    Glad you found it useful. Thanks so much for the feedback.
    ReplyDelete
  3. Good improvement by Google for blogger to professional blogging.
    ReplyDelete

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