Can anyone tell me a general technique for how I would go about generating a tag cloud on my website? This cloud would be based on tags that users have input into my database.

Does anyone have any good resources that you can point me too? or sample ASP.NET scripts for doing this?

Thanks,

Dave

What do you mean by 'tag'? 'tag' is a very generic word and could mean a lot of things...

A "Tag Cloud" is a new, Web 2.0 way of displaying categories of data on your website, popularized by Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/). Take a look at Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud) for a description and links to many examples, such as http://www.43things.com/ and http://del.icio.us/tag/ .

Hi Dave,

the reply is a little late but whatever:

I have a working ASP.NET tag cloud sample on my blog. You can download the sample code and adapt it to your needs.

Hope it helps!

Stefan

My company recently integrated a cloud tag into our software. The cloud tag appears within a styled div to give it a border and titlebar. On some of our pages, the tags overflow outside of the div, rather than wrapping. Any idea what may cause this?

Originally Posted by kingdavid

Does anyone have any good resources that you can point me too? or sample ASP.NET scripts for doing this?

Without knowing how the tags are stored and assigned in your database, you won't find terribly applicable code samples.

First you need a list of all your tags, and how often each one is used

Select Tag, Count_Big(*) From Some_Table Where Some_Condition_Is_Met

Then you need to normalize the range somehow, which again is domain specific. But for example if you have 3 tags, you've used Tag A 14 times, Tab B 9 times, and you've used Tag C a whopping 1,831,726 times, that isn't going to work.

Finally, write out the text of each tag with a font size style attribute based on however you normalize your range of use counts.

I've done this a few times and would add that a tag cloud is a visual tool to quickly draw the eye to the more common tags therefore it can be more useful to soft code the break points in your config file or a database settings table. So, rather than using maths logic to decide when a tag hits the next level, you decide and can change at runtime as your data set changes. This means that rather than getting into code to make your algorithm produce the desired visual effect (and maintain it as the data changes) you can just maintain a few settings and tweak quickly to get your message across.

v