Serendipity Forums

[RobA]

I have just started tagging my blog entries (ok, so I'm late to the game). I discovered this flash based movie to display tag clouds.

It was developed for WP initially, but has been ported to a number of other blog engines. The link I provides explains how to use it.

Would there be interest in (possibly me) enhancing the existing freetag plugin to support this as a display mechanism?

It looks quite simple... I think the only code changes would be in the serendipity_event_freetag::displayTags function to create the appropriate tag XML structure for the flash movie, and emit the framework code around it.

An additional option in each of the event and sidebar plugins ("Use flash cloud movie") would also be necessary...

It looks pretty straight forward.

-Rob A>

[Don Chambers]

Interesting... but a little too much for my personal tastes. I also wonder how it measures in SEO, accessibility, mobility, etc. Looks cool though!

[RobA]

Digging a bit more, this implementation uses the SWFObject javascript which

is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

the usage (in general) is:

Code: Select all

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>

<div id="tagcloudflash">
  This text is replaced by the Flash movie.
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
        var so = new SWFObject("tagcloud.swf", "tagcloudflash", "365", "365", "7", "#292929");
        so.addVariable("tcolor", "0xEBAF00");
        so.addVariable("tagcloud", tags);
        so.write("tagcloudflash");
</script>

So the existing tag code would sit in the flashcontent div, and replace it if the browser supports java and flash, otherwise will leave the text...still looking at it...

-Rob A>

[RobA]

OK-

So I have hacked it in to by s9y distribution. If you visit the site without javascript or flash you should see the normal tag cloud in the sidebar, otherwise you will get the flash cloud.

http://ffaat.pointclark.net/blog

I just installed the freetag plugin and converted categories to tags, so it is not yet complete.

Also, I have hardcoded the size to fit my sidebar. The intent is to add the sizes for sidebar and plugin views, as well as a "use flash" option to the configuration. This means that right now if you click on a tag you get the tag cloud the same size in the main page....

P.S. where does that blue background box come from?

Comments appreciated...

-Rob A>

[d_cee]

Hi Rob

that looks really neat!

I noticed there's another flash based tag cloud on the authors site 'Tagnetic Poetry' any chance you could convert that one too?

cheers

Dave

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Yay, that looks nice! I'd love to commit this to the spartacus repository once you're done

Many thanks,
Garvin

[RobA]

That's the plan, Garvin!

I'll probably just post up a diff here.

One thing, the SWFObject javascript is released under the MIT license. Is that acceptable to bundle?

-Rob A>

[RobA]

It has been a while since I've written/modified a plugin....

Is there a colour picker widget available for the backend now?

-Rob A>

[blog.brockha.us]

Hmm.. Should I see it inside of the "(Im)Personal Tags" Area? There is a flash object but it displays just white here.. Firefox 3, Linux

[judebert]

There's no color-picker widget in the backend yet. I've considered it, but I want to be able to update a preview at the same time, which is more difficult. It's stupid, too; you'd think I wouldn't let the pursuit of perfection prevent me from implementing SOMETHING.

I'm also having problems with the tag cloud. Firefox 2, Linux. It seems blank.

[RobA]

My mistake. - I was playing with tag scaling and messed it up... Should be visible now, and should error out gracefully if flash < 7 is installed.

-Rob A>

[blog.brockha.us]

Ah! Nice! No it is visible with FF/Linux, too.
But if I click on a tag on the next page it vanishes leaving the normale text base cloud.

[RobA]

OK - take a look now-

I have added configuration parameters to both the sidebar plugin and the event plugin:

Code: Select all

Use Flash to display the tag cloug?      Yes No
Flash tag color (rrggbb)
Make flash tag cloud background transparent?    Yes No
Flash tag cloud background color (rrggbb)
Flash tag cloud width     
Flash tag cloud motion speed


So the width and colours can be set seperately for the sidebar and the "big" cloud.

I also hooked the bg colour and tag colour parameters into the css emit, rather than the hard coded values (though they can still be overridden with entries in the main css file.)

My main blog page (see sig) has the sidebar.

An example of the related tags is here: http://ffaat.pointclark.net/blog/plugin/tag/gimp

or the main tag cloud is just here:
http://ffaat.pointclark.net/blog/plugin/tag

The only oddness is that of the related tags has none, an empty box gets generated... I think this is a bug as the the code is checking for any empty array but not seeing it...

I'm working on a diff right now...

-Rob A>

[judebert]

Wow. That's impressive.

[RobA]

Thanks!

Most of the work is not mine... just the bundling it into the s9y freetag plugin.

-Rob A>