As I continue to customize my new mephisto installation, I wanted a tag cloud for the Folksonomy section at the bottom of the page. At first I thought I would use a mephisto plugin… after further consideration I decided that was a little overkill. JavaScript kicks ass, especially with the recent release of mootools version 1.0, so I decided to let it do the work. I created a small class called Overcast which makes tag clouds easy peasy japaneasy. So, just how easy is it to get a tag cloud in mephisto? Here’s a snipet from my layout.liquid

{{ 'mootools' | javascript }}
{{ 'overcast' | javascript }}
</head>

<div id="overcast">
  {% for tag in site.tags %}
    <a href="/tags/{{ tag }}" class="_{{tag | tagged_articles | size}}" rel="tag">{{ tag }}</a>
  {% endfor %}
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
  over = new Overcast({min: 1, fuzz: 2, overlay: "/images/gloss.png"});
</script>

A couple sexy things to note are the cool transparent overlays ontop of each tag, and the ability to fuzz tags when your weights aren’t very diverse. Also, if you’ve got Firebug you can type over.update(“amazing”,4) in the console to add a new tag to the cloud with that weight, or over.update(“javascript”, 3) to change the weight of an existing tag. All of the functionality is documented in the source.

Grab the source from the include in this page. I’ll put it under version control soon.

Dang, procrastination is a terrible terrible thing. I had been doing allot of traveling prior to the Holidays and just didn’t have the motivation needed to put the time into setting up Mephisto. I finnaly got around to doing it, and it went pretty well. The Typo conversion didn’t happen as smoothly as I had hoped and I had to hack the Flickr plugin a bit to get her up and going, but she’s finally here. This time around I shouldn’t rank as #1 on Google for a series of absurdly explicit terms describing grotesque sexual actions… Thank you Akismet. I also decided to drop the blog from blog.vandev.com. From now on, this is vandev.com.

I’ve got a couple new little projects that I’ll release in the near future. Merb has entertained me as of late, as well as MooTools. Anyway, I’ll get them up and I’ll finish polishing the site. Polishing it until it shines.

The SDRuby podcast site is filling up with great episodes. One of which being my little talk on camping and Croppr (Episode 002 on the bottom). The thing has been up for a couple of monthes now, but my posting consistency has been miserable lately. I’ve had more pressing issues, but today is a new day. My next project will be pushing this thing over to Mephisto. I should also spend some time fixing the Rails date_select helper, but that’s another post all together. The next time I speak, the entire back end of this puppy will be different… totally awesome.