HTML cloud without Silverlight
In the last post, I briefly described the new HTML cloud functionality. In the latest version of Tagxedo (just uploaded), I decided to remove the remaining jQuery magic and make it a pure, embeddable image map using HTML only.
The significance?
- You should be able to embed it in your blog even if scripts / plugins are disallowed or disabled.
- Your entire audience, regardless of browser and OS, whether they have Silverlight or not, should be able to view your cloud.
Here's an example. All words are clickable and lead to the corresponding Google searches (or to the Tagxedo page if you click "www.tagxedo.com").
- Make a Tagxedo (of course)!
- Click "Save" and use the "Html Cloud (Experimental)" option.
- Choose the dimensions (e.g. width of 600px or less, height of 400px or less).
- Save both the image (e.g. tagxedo.jpg) and the Html (e.g. tagxedo.html).
- Upload the image to your site and copy the actual URL. You can also use any 3rd party site, such as the wonderful free image hosting site Imgur.
- Edit tagxedo.html to refer to this URL
- Cut and paste the portion of HTML code in tagxedo.html to your index.html between the <div> tags, inclusive
That's it! And since there is no Javascript involved, this method should be accepted by all blogging platforms.
Two caveats:
- The links are always Google queries. This will be improved later, and for now, you can customize your links by editing tagxedo.html directly (global search-and-replace).
- The words don't animate.
Last but not least, HTML purist may wonder... why not just use pure image-free HTML (CSS + @fontface)? That's a good question. Actually I have tried that and the short answer is that it doesn't work (well). At least not in any compatible or consistent way. I guess I'll explain that in a separate blog post.
