Buyog's Lair

New site features: tags/labels

Saturday, June 20, 2009

So, yesterday I got an itch to try and write some code to auto-generate a "tag cloud" to present a slightly different way to dig into the deep content on my blog. It amazes me that I've actually been writing this thing for nearly 7 years now! (since August 2002) That's a lot of content to go back through, if you were looking for some particular post that had dropped off of my front page due to age.

So, as of yesterday, all the content on this blog has now been tagged (Blogger uses the term "labels," but it amounts to the same thing, and "Label Cloud" doesn't sound as snazzy), and you can see the label(s) for any given post at the bottom-left. (this post is tagged as "site news"). If you click on the tag/label name, you'll be shown a single, large page that includes all of my posts on that subject. I've also added a preliminary (and admittedly rough) Tag Cloud section to the navigation bar on the right side of the blog.

You probably know how tag clouds work, but in case you don't: the size of the tag name indicates how often I talk about that subject. Some of those surprised me: for example, I expected the "12 Days of Christmas" posts to be pretty prominent, and the tag reflects that, but "Lobo" still has all the rest of them beat, hands down. Makes sense, I suppose: if you view that tag's page, you'll see that early on I posted just about every little stinking detail of his progress up to the 1^st alpha release, 1^st public beta, 2^nd public beta, 1^st "it's done" release, and last year's remix. Plus I still think of him as one of my favorite MUGEN "children." So yeah, I've posted a lot about Lobo. ^_^

One note: a lot of those early posts are broken in one way or another... either because I linked to my old CJB-hosted redirect (prior to getting my buyog.com domain), or because I used relative paths to link to stuff, or because the old content doesn't exist online anymore (which, alas, is the case with many of the old screenshots, sprite animations, and alpha/beta releases). At some point I may go back and fix some of them, but then again, maybe they're more authentic this way. What do y'all think?

Anyway, I've found it mildly diverting to trip down memory lane and see how far I've come in the past 7 years. Here's to many more.

Labels: news