Hokay, after a bout of bashing that I ensued on tag clouds, I’m now experimenting with them just to see what kind of words this blog throws up, that my brain involutarily repeats. It would be a revealation in itself and a kind of corrective measure or even an opportunity to prune my vocabulary.

Still don’t get what I’m talking about? Head over to my sidebar and look-up just below the Categories section. Yeah baby, that’s right, go on, click on the funny words.

Setting it up was awfully easy. I just signed-up on TagCloud, entered my own feed (no opml, because I don’t want to know what words or phrases others on my blogroll are using) and then plugged a couple of lines in my template (one stylesheet and the other a javascript that pulls the words).

I’ll be watching how things turn-up there. That reminds me that I should increase the number of posts on my feed (or else I’ll be seeing a lot of non-sensical tags).

Update: Oh, okay, now I know what’s happening. The words with heavy weights have nothing to do with my blog, I’ve probably used them only once or twice. This tag cloud is actually matching with its central data from everybody else using TagCloud. Notice that I don’t use the word “apparently” so much to look like a big one compared to some others, but it shows up big. So I capiche that it is emphasizing most commonly used words across blogosphere and whoever is using this system. I might as well pump in my opml files.

Update 2: Uh oh! TagCloud cannot read OPML 1.1. Pity, because FeedDemon generates those. This is the error I get:

An error has occured while processing the OPML file: An error occured while loading the XML data.

Update 3: Just reported that to TagCloud.

Update 4 [July 17]: Couldn’t wait for TagCloud to fix the errors related to OPML 1.1. Just whipped-up Sage that does a perfect OPML 1.1 import, exported all my feeds from FeedDemon to one file and exported back. Sage outputs OPML 1.0 that TagCloud seems to read and recognize perfectly. Expect to see a lot of words that I don’t personally use =)

Update 5 [July 17]: Looks like I’m doing an involuntary review of TagCloud from my personal experiences. So, while TagCloud could pick-up some of my feeds before timing out, it seems it’s unable to handle my OPML upload. It just freaked out (and not displaying my clouds either). Spitting an application error (screenshot #1, screenshot #2).

Update 6 [July 17]: Had to delete my channel and recreate. This time I broke-up the OPML file into smaller chunks of feeds. Seemed to work well. So, ladies and gentlemen, those are the keywords (sort of) that reflect my private blogroll. Enjoy!

Update 7 [July 19]: Tag clouds are now showing keywords or phrases only from my feeds.

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