Category: Tips and Tricks
Tag Clouds, you have seen them on delicious, Technorati or Flickr, are an easy way to get people explore your site deeper. Here’s a sample tag cloud that uses Google AJAX Search.
Tag Clouds (provided they are not cluttered and display just the relevant words) help visitors quickly visualize what your website is all about since the topics you frequently cover are mentioned in bold or relatively bigger fonts.
WordPress community already offers some excellent plugins for generating tag clouds (like the Ultimate Warrior) plus the upcoming release, WP 2.3, has inbuilt support for tagging.
However, if you are on Blogger or have a non-blog website, there’s no reason that you should miss Tag Clouds.
Here’s how to add a good looking tag cloud to your Blogger blog:
1. Type your Blogger feed address in RainMaker
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xyz/posts/default?max-results=999
Remember to replace xyz with your Blog ID. This URL will retrieve your latest 999 posts and supply that for analysis to RainMaker.
2. For the word link, type the following (where xxx is your blog name, e.g. labnol)
http://xxx.blogspot.com/search?q=%%enc_word%%
3. You can change the default font size, tag cloud dimension background image and colors to fit your site theme.
4. Now the tricky part. Once you have generated the tag cloud using RainMaker, right click over your tag cloud and click “View HTML source” - that the code you need to copy paste in your site.
Tip for Tag Clouds - If you really want visitors to spend more time on your site via Tag Clouds, always keep the number of words in Tag Cloud to an absolute minimum and that there is sufficient space around each word.
Category: Tips and Tricks
Their capabilities should be built into the operating system, something both Microsoft and Apple are working on. Windows users have a while to wait — Win XP’s successor, nicknamed Longhorn, won’t ship before the summer of 2006 — but Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger should arrive this spring. Rob Pegoraro writes an interesting article on Desktop Search Tools: Seeking a More Intuitive Search Tool
The file-search tool in Windows XP is a dog, and not just metaphorically — a little animated puppy appears on screen to indicate your query’s status by wagging its tail, panting, scratching itself and other actions.
If only Microsoft’s programmers had put such effort into the rest of this software! Its searches run painfully slowly and routinely yield masses of unrelated files.
A gaggle of contenders has recently put forth replacements for Microsoft’s search. Some are popular Web portals — Ask Jeeves, Google and Yahoo. Some are small, obscure developers — Copernic and Blinkx. One’s a division of Microsoft itself, its MSN Internet service. All six of their search add-ons are free downloads: Ask Jeeves Desktop Search (sp.ask.com/docs/desktop/), Blinkx v2.0 (www.blinkx.com), Copernic Desktop Search 1.2 (www.copernic.com; a version of this should be offered by America Online soon), Google Desktop (desktop.google.com), MSN Toolbar Suite Beta (desktop.msn.com) and Yahoo Desktop Search (desktop.yahoo.com). All require Windows 2000 or XP (save Copernic, which allows Win 98 or newer), and all but Google Desktop and Copernic are in test form — though none crashed in a week of use.
Every program here can track Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, audio and image files and Microsoft Outlook e-mail; all but Ask can index PDF files and Outlook Express mail. But if you use a non-Microsoft mail program, only Blinkx and Google welcome you: The former works with Eudora, the latter with Netscape, Mozilla and Thunderbird.
Web-history searching is absent from MSN and Yahoo and half-absent from Ask (it supports only Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer). Blinkx, Copernic and Google work with the far superior Mozilla Firefox as well. Yahoo and Google also index chats carried out in, respectively, the Yahoo and AIM instant-messaging programs. Lastly, Copernic and Yahoo can find contacts stored in such software as Outlook and Outlook Express.
Ask, Blinkx, Copernic and Yahoo use their own software. Yahoo’s overgrown interface assumes you’ll turn a file search into a “CSI” episode. Blinkx’s how-cool-am-I looks bury menus and make it easy to miss such crafty features as “Smart Folders” that automatically group files matching search criteria. All these programs let you preview documents, messages and other items without opening them in their original programs. You can even click a link to reply to or forward an e-mail message in your regular mail program.
Microsoft will make some significant announcement at 8:30 AM PST which is not related to the Yahoo! deal. The press call will be attended by CEO Steve Ballmer, CSA Ray Ozzie and other top executives.
