Tag Cloud Usability

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Lately I've been playing with the mootools javascript framework and I've been exploring some of the possibilities of improved user-content interaction. I've come up with an "enhanced" tag cloud filter which allows users to quickly narrow down tag results based on popularity or search for a particular tag. A demo, along with the pertinent javascript source, is available at my links archive page.

I've also released a new plugin for MODx, virtual aliases, which allows multiple document aliases to be defined for a single document. To preserve search engine friendliness, the virtual aliases are 301 redirected to the actual document.

Lastly, I've posted a few screenshots of the latest development version of my counter/stats application. I'm planning a name change as well as a full development API, which I am currently in the midst of coding. For database abstraction, I'm making use of the OpenExpedio framework for maximum scalability and compatibility.

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2007/06/06 @ 22:12 blog, update RSS

Just noticed your Tag cloud filter, I have come up with a very similar implementation using Prototype/Scriptaculous. Although I've not got the nice transition effects.

Take a look at my implementation ->

Article (http://www.griffininteractive.net/2007/07/tag_cloud_filter.html)

Example
(http://www.griffininteractive.net/slider/slider.html)

It's also available to download as a zip archive!!

James Griffin on 2007/07/24 @ 05:16

Hi,

Really nice site. I'm trying to work out how to format the date in a blog in a similar way to yours. Can you point me in the right direction?

I've tried using , , placeholders but that doesn't work. I've tried passing a chunk and a tv to formatDate. Still nothing.

I can't see how it gets formatted.

Thanks,
Luke.

Luke A. Guest on 2007/07/27 @ 12:15

The missing bits between the commas should be day, month and year, but I enclosed them in modx placeholder syntax, which got removed.

Oh well.

Luke A. Guest on 2007/07/27 @ 12:30

Sokay, worked it out. Nicked a bit of your CSS as well ;) hope you don't mind?

Luke A. Guest on 2007/07/27 @ 13:03

@James:
Thanks for sharing, your tag cloud filter looks good and should prove useful for sites that are "outgrowing" their current cloud.

@Luke:
Thanks for the kind words, no problem on the CSS as long as you are adapting it to your needs and not outright copying my specific combinations of fonts/layout/colors.

What are you using to format the dates? Ditto provides its own (date format parameter), for date formatting outside of ditto, check out PHx. I will be sure to address a bit more thoroughly this when I post my MODx blog tutorial.

Brian Stanback on 2007/07/31 @ 02:05

Nah, not outright copying...see http://www.archangeli.co.uk Just nabbed the date formatting and modified the selectors/colours/etc.

I'm using the following code on the page itself:

Page of Articles <span id="ditto_pages"> </span>

then using this bit of code inside ai-ditto-blogTpl to format the date:

<p></p>

As you can see from my site, I've stated that I've changed the show_tags page to be the home page, and the date is formatted properly.

I also, was going to produce a simplistic MODx blog tutorial to:

1) Show how to create a simple one using MODx, Ditto and Jot!

2) Show that the problem I describe does occur from using the main page that is set up with the install.

Thanks for the replies,
Luke.

Luke on 2007/07/31 @ 14:24

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