New Widget!

I took a deep, scary breath and overwrote some of the code on my blogger template to get a new widget: a tag cloud instead of a label list.

If you understood the previous sentence, you might want to skip to the end of this post, if you're interested in getting code for your own tag cloud on Blogger. If that sentence sounded like a foreign language, here's a translation: widgets are little applications, or mini-programs, that run on something like a blogger page. See all those things in the right column, such as Followers, archived posts, and Twitter Updates? Those are examples of widgets.

One of the widgets I've wanted for a while is a "tag cloud." You know how you can label your posts so that they can be categorized, either by you or someone reading your blog? For example, I label all my posts about my 6x6" weekly square project with "weekly_square." I used to have a label list over in the right column, so someone could click "weekly_square" and see all the posts with that label. Tags are a synonym for labels, but tag clouds are cooler than label lists because they take up less room, and because the font size of the tag indicates the number of posts with that tag. The bigger the font, the more posts tagged with that label. So, if you look over at my tag cloud on the right side, you'll see that "painted fabric" and "quilting" are in a larger font, and so have lots of posts. "Workspace" is in a tiny font, so there aren't many posts with that label. To see all the posts with a particular label or tag, you just click on the word, and Blogger will bring up those posts.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to thank Raymond at Compender for providing the code for the tag cloud. Blogger has a lot of built-in widgets, but I haven't been able to find one for a tag cloud, so I Googled it and found one right away. The code only works on Blogger; you'll have to keep looking if you have another blog host. Compender has a lot of information on customizing Blogger, so take a look if you're interested.

I did save a backup copy of my template to my system before I made any changes to it, just in case the code didn't work, or I messed up the cut-and-paste job.