The value of a tag cloud

I was talking about this the other day, about what the actual value of a tag cloud is and if anyone had implemented it really well.

My initial reactions were ‘of course’, ‘they’re everywhere’ and something to the effect of yes they’re very clever.

Of course only some of my thoughts were gathered for this conversation and I did go away and really considered the effectiveness of a tag cloud specifically for blogs and why I generally warm more to a tag cloud than a list of categories.

I’ve embraced a tag cloud on my site pretty much from the moment I discovered a plugin to do so.  Maybe it’s just the way my mind is wired but I’ve always liked the look and feel of them.  So when I was able to I had to have one.

The only thing is that originally I don’t think I used it well, it wasn’t very well integrated into the site.  Tags were an afterthought if I was feeling particulary thorough on the day.

My categories were my bread and butter, you want to read about my thoughts on a television show then you have to go and have a look at the television category (or use search, never forget search!), but who knows from the title ‘television’ which shows I was talking about.  I’m talking Star Trek and 24 and you were hoping for Gilmore Girls.  If instead of my category list you were looking at a tag cloud you may notice Star Trek and Jack Bauer in the cloud but no Rory or what’s his name who has the baseball cap in Gilmore Girls.

This is all very well and good but I have somewhere in the vicinity of 200 plus tags and they show up randomly in my tag cloud so this isn’t the best way to navigate my site, if you are really interested in reading my thoughts on Ghost Rider it’s probably best to do a search unless it’s his turn to show up in the tag cloud.

But how do you know that I might be writing about Ghost Rider if he doesn’t show up immediately in the tags or the categories.  Well this is where the real value is, and this is something that I discovered on the Aussie Blogger’s Forum (which is celebrating its six month anniversary too btw).  Your tag cloud is a great summary of your blog.

You see I was working on my about me page at the time and I was wondering if my site was focused and on topic enough.  Speaking to someone on the forum I mentioned my concerns and they went straight to my tag cloud and said it paints a pretty clear picture that you write about popular culture, sure enough there it was, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Comics, Iron Man, Sci Fi, books etc.

Now it becomes clear how important the tag cloud is to your first time readers who will very generously give you something like four seconds or something to be convinced to stay.  If your tag cloud has keywords and topics that grabs my interest I’m more likely to bookmark the site and come back or even continue reading there and then!

Mmmmm I’m thinking of a template refit and maybe I’ll bump my tag cloud higher.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Short posts

So quick question for you all and I might after I post this question change the poll with this question (because the poll is now woefully out of date).

Do you when you regularly read a blog mind really short posts every once and a while or do you feel that you’re wasting your time visiting if all you get is one paragraph?

Just wondering because sometimes I just want to put something out there and it just doesn’t warrant a longer post.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Australia Day 2008

I’m not militant about celebrating Australia Day. I mean I’m Australian and I love that but I’m not about to walk around dragging our national flag along the ground because I want to stick one end of the flag down the back of my pants. The flag for me is something a little more sacred than that, but of course that’s just my feelings, in a country that is often saturated by Americanisms it is nice to see some national pride. Do we have to be so coarse about it though?

I did have an understated pleasant day which for us lately is a very welcome oddity. It was bloody hot though and I did have to hide in the air conditioning of the shopping centre for a couple of hours where I cleaned up with new jocks and playstation games.

When we got home I had to baby sit our bubby dog because he won’t eat his bone unless I sit there with him because he’s too worried that the other dog has something better.

It wouldn’t worry me if he were an actual puppy but he’s a big boy now and should know better.

We listened to a fair chunk of the Triple J hottest 100 for 2007 and Tracey missed the women’s tennis final.

Because it is Australia Day I’ve got to send out some link love to the Aussie Bloggers Forum and Aussie Bloggers blog! Where today they have interviewed Darren Rowse of Problogger.

I think that’s what my secret goal would be for here, to be established enough that people would like to interview me LOL.

Tonight we’ll probably watch some Torchwood or whatever else we’ve got waiting.

Happy Australia Day all.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Round Up

Well it’s been a busy couple of days I’ve upgraded both Internet Explorer and Firefox at the same time and have been working on a site redesign (granted the original was a design done by me over a year ago).

I’m always impressed at how easy it is to update Firefox. Download, execute and customize if you so wish and depending on your connection it is so quick. Now IE was a bit of a different story. Just as simple to do except it took so much longer to do. Don’t get me wrong I’m not bashing for the sake of it - I’m just making an observation. With IE installation it took around 10 minutes or so and really that’s not a huge ask of my time.

Going to play around with them both - my general browsing is always done by Firefox so I use that a bit more. Loving the spell check in that actually. When I upgraded it presented a bunch of extensions that i hadn’t seen so I was happy to load a couple of them. With IE I have to say I’m really impressed by it’s upgrade - to me this is probably the best upgrade they’ve done (in terms of improvement over the last one). I will probably give this a bit more of a go as with it’s previous version was only on my system to test designs and look after pages that Firefox didn’t work with (Brisbane City Library - I mean what’s going on there? I sent them an email asking if they were going to address it and six months later I’m still waiting for a reply.)

The site I’ve been working on is a Kombi Sales site based on the Gold Coast. They were updating their name to Coast to Coast Kombis and we decided it would be a good idea to give the site a bit of a face lift and a spring clean. The main thing was improving the back end for the client and applying CSS instead of it’s table based design. It was really great actually because there was a layout on OSWD that I had my eye on for a while and after a fair amount of modification it fit perfectly.

Someone over at BlogMad gave this site a 1 on the Varb voting system - I really hope it was just someone who didn’t realize that the rating system works with 10 being the highest - it doesn’t make that very clear. If not and they meant to hit 1 that’s fine welcome to the web - I’ll try harder in the future!

On a more positive note Crypt Hunter got reviewed the other day at critiquemyblog and this was said:

“If you want to take an adventure into the world of the Bazaar then check out this blog. I don[’t mean that in a negative way…it’s actually a pretty funny and interesting blog full of wit and humor.”

Popularity: 17% [?]

MySpace, Crypt Hunter and Shopping!

Been a little busy over the last couple of days working on a couple of smaller projects. The biggest of these is Crypt Hunter which i’m pleased to say just goes from strength to strength. Last month we doubled the unique hits on the site and this month we’ve already smashed that figure and going to do around four times as many visitors as last month. With the growth we expanded it a little and now you can buy stuff with the Bowler Hat Brigade (read the site from the start to make sense of this!!). the next thing will be to put up a downloads page where you can download a couple of desktops.

Click Here To Visit The Store!

I was really happy with the ‘Dummies’ mock up I did for that post too - it came up really well (check it out here) .

The next thing I’m going to be doing is a new layout for a myspace profile and blog page for quietpaws (I did the wordpress blog site). I’ve done layouts there before but myspace can be quirky and you have to do a bit of gonzo CSS to make it do what you want! I’ll post here my progress.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Starting From Scratch

After about a year away from the ‘web’ industry I really felt when I decided to come back that a refresher course was in store and I must say it has been refreshing!

I’m going back and doing all the HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL tutorials I can get my hands on. Not that I really need it but I think it’s good to sometimes strip back to the bare essentials and renew your confidence. Besides even good old HTML has changed over the past couple of years and CSS has become really important. Sites like myspace and blogging tools really show what knowing a fair bit about style sheets can do!

The other things that I’m looking at are business related guides too I figure it all helps - might have to learn a new language too!

Popularity: 13% [?]