Serendipity Forums

Dear all,

I've installed the freetags plug-in on my blog and have set up a Flash tag cloud, which works nicely. Quite a few of the tags I use contain two words (e.g. "book review"), but these appear in the cloud without a space between them, which is something I don't want to happen. What file needs to be adapted here and how should I do it to get a space inserted in such cases, please? Any ideas?

Regards

Carl

Does that happen in the flash only? Then it could be a matter of the flash script tagcloud.swf....
The only thing I could imagine, is to set tags like this: "book review"...

Hi Ian,

Yes, it only happens when Flash is activated.

I've just tried adding   between a two-word tag on the "Manage tags" configuration page in Admin and that got saved alright, but it caused the tag cloud to disappear from view, so that's not the answer, unfortunately.

It only happens in the tag cloud, by the way - if I click on a moving two-word tag there, it gets displayed correctly in the next view (showing all the pages in which the tag has been used). So it must be something to do with the way Flash itself interprets the tags and spaces.

Regards

Carl

Well, that is not editable (at least for me)
Please also read about flash cloud tag amount limitation here: http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=19321

Thanks for the link to the other thread, Ian. I've already limited the number of tags to 20, so that seems OK for now.

The only layman's way I can think of dealing with the tag issue is to use "_" between the words in a two-word tag. I wonder if that would work? Or just to leave things as they are, in which case two words will continue to be displayed as if they were one long one. Not very satisfactory in my opinion, but I like the moving Flash cloud enough to be able to live with that, at least for a while. Displaying the tags without the Flash functionality isn't an option, really - I don't like the way it looks, I'm afraid.

Couldn't a PHP programmer simply make a stationary tag cloud that looks like the Web 2.0 one here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

That would do me fine. It's a good idea to be able to feed new tags to the application based on tags in new blog posts, but perhaps we should also have a simpler manual option as well in which a user can define all the tags he or she wants to appear in a stationary tag cloud in advance (and change them whenever necessary).

Regards

Carl

Carl @ ATS wrote:The only layman's way I can think of dealing with the tag issue is to use "_" between the words in a two-word tag. I wonder if that would work? Or just to leave things as they are, in which case two words will continue to be displayed as if they were one long one. Not very satisfactory in my opinion,

IMHO - leave things as they are!

Carl @ ATS wrote:Couldn't a PHP programmer simply make a stationary tag cloud that looks like the Web 2.0 one here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

Nice examples! Yes, simply make ... As mentioned in some other thread (I don't remember where), there are modern HTML5 alternatives for modern browsers... but if that is easy to implement, I don't know?!

Carl @ ATS wrote:Couldn't a PHP programmer simply make a stationary tag cloud that looks like the Web 2.0 one here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

Maybe I don't get what you mean by “stationary”, but isn't that just what the non-flash (standard) option of the plugin emits minus a little styling (which could easily be done using CSS)?

YL

Perhaps it would be possible to modify the "Manage Tags" page in the Admin back end and include a simple text editor for entering and changing tags. If this accepted the HTML entity for a non-breaking space, for example, then it might be possible for the Flash application to use the tags that include it and display them correctly.

Just an idea. At the moment, the editor on the Manage Tags page is very simple and doesn't recognise HTML or the symbol you can use in Microsoft Word for the same purpose. It would be good to have at least one of these options included.

Regarding your reply, Yellowled, if I de-activate the Flash option and choose not to use XML icons or a linefeed, then I simply get a string of tags, one after the other. You can see this in the image I'm enclosing (linear_tags.png) along with two other variants that are possible. No cloud whatsoever.

Regards

Carl

Here's the Flash version that I'm currently using, too (sorry, but I could only attach three images to the last message - that's the limit). That's a sort of cloud, at least.

Regards

Carl

Well, a cloud is not a word with positive vibrations in these days

Try this and insert at here:
https://github.com/s9y/additional_plugi ... g.php#L590 This should automatically replace "book review" with "book_review" in flash.

Thanks for helping, Ian. It's a clever idea to change the way the tags are displayed in Flash without actually changing their names elsewhere.

Best,

Carl

Carl @ ATS wrote:Regarding your reply, Yellowled, if I de-activate the Flash option and choose not to use XML icons or a linefeed, then I simply get a string of tags, one after the other.

Well, first of all, you'd need to activate the (plugin's) option to scale the font-size of tags according to their popularity. The rest of it really depends on the way your template styles the tag cloud. Usually, a text-align: center; on the tag cloud gives you something resembling the look of a cloud.

Of course, you can't get to exactly the same effect with CSS only. Then again, an HTML/CSS tag cloud is accessibly to all your visitors (unlike the Flash version).

YL

Thanks for your suggestion, too, Yellowled. I'll play around with the settings over the next few days and see what results I come up with.

Regarding what you say about Flash, why shouldn't it work on most users' screens? I thought it was platform-independent and is needed to display moving elements on web pages? Those crop up all the time these days, even on news pages, so I presumed (perhaps mistakenly so) that most people have it installed on their PCs and laptops. In my target group, at least, which is translators, many of whom work on computers all day long.

Just curious to know...

Regards

Carl

Carl @ ATS wrote:Regarding what you say about Flash, why shouldn't it work on most users' screens? I thought it was platform-independent and is needed to display moving elements on web pages?

Well, first of all, users need to have a Flash plugin installed in their browser. Some people fail to do that, some don't want to have Flash installed (for various reasons) and on some devices (iPhone/iPad) Flash isn't even available. Also Flash can be an accessibility issue, e.g. people using the keyboard exclusively or using a screenreader might not be able to access content (or navigation) built in Flash. (It is possible to build “accessible Flash elements”, but it's much more of an effort, so most people don't bother.)

YL

I see. Thank you for explaining that.

Regards

Carl