In a somewhat previous life, I used to write software. At this point it’s been years since I’ve written a line of production code. But I still poke around every once in a while. I’ve even coded up some plugins that I use on Rat’s Reading. Most are very specific to that site, such as adding in my Amazon associates tag automatically. Not really releasable stuff.
Both on that site and this one, I use Simple Tags to manage my tags. Pretty good plugin. However, one of my irritations both with that plugin’s tag cloud and the standard WordPress tag cloud are that they use linear scaling for font sizes. In other words, if a site has one tag that has a disproportionate number of uses, the font sizing is worthless. See this post for a good explanation.
Anyway, I took the ideas from that blog post and hacked the Simple Tags tag cloud implementation on Rat’s Reading to use logarithmic scaling. But every version upgrade of Simple Tags overwrites that, which is a pain. So I looked for a standalone tag cloud with this kind of scaling so I wouldn’t lose my changes every time I upgraded.
I couldn’t find a standalone tag cloud plugin that implements logarithmic scaling. So I just wrote one. And here’s version 1.0 (beta). It’s very very simple. Almost zero features. Only way to get a tag cloud is via shortcode, and it only implements options in the standard WordPress tag cloud functions. I’m throwing it out in case other folks want to play with similar stuff. I will add a few features over the next few weeks and versions, as it’s currently not good enough to replace my modified Simple Tags tag cloud.