I’ll never forget the day I discovered Wordle. Colourful, uniquely arranged words, sized according to popularity… beautiful!
In September 2007 WordPress 2.3 launched with tagging built-in. The WordPress tag clouds are a great core feature but fall well short of looking as good as Wordle clouds.
Fancy looking tag clouds aren’t for everyone but if you feel your WordPress tag clouds are looking a bit ordinary, read on.
A few weeks ago I met with programmer Neil E. Pearson to discuss a need to make WordPress tag clouds look like Wordle clouds. Collectively, we produced FatCloud. We are in beta release and are seeking help from other WordPress tag cloud users to iron out any bugs before we officially submit it as a plugin to WordPress. Please download and install FatCloud using the link below. We look forward to your feedback.
Download and add FatCloud as a WordPress plugin : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/netlifes-tag-cloud-fatcloud/
Our flash tag cloud plugin ships with a few skins for you to choose from however you may like to create your own. For those wishing to create their own skin we have made available the .fla and supporting .as files, available as a developer pack here : Developer Pack. Note: font files are not included in the developer pack. While the fonts used in our skins are free to use, it was not known for certain whether we would be entitled to offer them as a download from our website.
FatCloud Example
FatCloud by Netlife
FatCloud Settings
FatCloud Settings
Wordle Theme Settings
Wordle Theme Settings
It’s now been 12 months since the release (via automatic updates) of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). 79% of visitors to our client sites are using an Internet Explorer browser (a reduction of 3% from when last we posted stats 9 months ago). Firefox achieved a 14% penetration.
Browser penetration breakdown across Fatpublisher client sites:
Internet explorer version 6 versus 7 :
And for the screen resolution junkies:
Until next time… happy designing, happy programming.
Google bought Urchin Web Analytics in 2005. Since then we have seen some major changes to the original Urchin software. Earlier this year Google upgraded their analytics offering significantly. Google Analytics is now a very popular and powerful website reporting tool.
Fatpublisher have up until now offered a customised version of webalizer to all clients. We now simply recommend and configure Google Analytics accounts. Webalizer continues to be available however we have found that as soon as our clients begin using Google Analytics they very rarely refer to webalizer anymore. Read the rest of this post »
We are always looking for ways of accurately reporting the success of websites in the search engines. Screen scraping the search engine result pages is not always an option since they often lock you out after a certain number of queries. We devoted some time to developing a web based log analyser that charts the number of referrals from the major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Live Search.
Check it out, feedback welcome : siterake
The majority of search engines today handle singular and plural keywords differently. Were they to treat singular and keywords the same, the search results would be the same, evidently they are not.
Try it now by searching the major search engines for both ‘website designers sydney’ and ‘website designer sydney’, the results are often remarkably different:
Live : website designers sydney »
Live : website designer sydney »
Google : website designers sydney »
Google : website designer sydney »
Yahoo : website designers sydney »
Yahoo : website designer sydney »
It is important therefore, to optimise a website for both singular and plural keywords and in proportion to their respective usages. If most people would search using a plural than more effort should be directed towards optimising the website for the search phrase involving the plural keyword.
