Welcome to "All Things Tagxedo", the official Tagxedo blog now hosted by Posterous!  Now you get all the goodies that comes with a "real" blogging platform -- Search, comments, tags, RSS, and more.

I have written about 10 posts in the temporary "blog", which have now all been reposted.

The following is a list of recent updates since I last posted:

(1) Make a Tagxedo, Quick! -- If you haven't been to the homepage lately, I encourage you to do so.  Now you can quickly create a Tagxedo in mere seconds!  Enter a URL, Twitter ID, delicious ID, news keywords, search terms, or an RSS-ready URL (e.g. a typical blog), hit enter, and voila!

More specifics about what data is used by Tagxedo to create the cloud:

URL -- the webpage
Twitter ID -- latest 100 posts.
Delicious ID -- top 100 delicious tags (including frequencies).
News keywords -- Google News RSS feed
Search keywords -- Bing search RSS fee
RSS -- the corresponding RSS feed of the URL

(2) [Experimental] HTML cloud -- while Silverlight is required to build Tagxedo, you can now create a clickable tag cloud that is solely based on HTML and Javascript.  Go to "Save", figure out the desired dimensions of the tag cloud, and save both an image (must be named "tagxedo.jpg") and the corresponding HTML ("tagxedo.html").  Now just open the HTML and you have a fully working clickable Tagxedo that everyone can see!

I am not sure what to do with this yet, hence this is just an experiment.  Though this sounds nice in theory (no plugin required), the image is at least 2X larger in size than the corresponding Silverlight player, and the words don't animate.  Is this acceptable?  Useful?

There are more ways to create HTML clouds.  For example, (a) use only plain text and CSS magic (only works with standard web fonts and "horizontal" orientation), and (2) use Html5 Canvas + SVG font.  The killer problem (even for (a)) is that font rendering is inconsistent across browsers -- and HTML5 and better web standard won't solve this problem -- and when the words are off, they may either create holes or overlaps in the word cloud, potentially turning a visually stunning cloud into an eyesore.

I don't know, I'm still looking into this.  I'd like to get some feedback on this.

(3) Custom Shape -- you can continue to edit a shape after you have "accepted" it and used it.  Yeah, sometimes the shape looks good until you put it in action.

(4) Hard Boundary -- now you can specify whether the boundary of the shape is soft (the default) or hard.  Hard boundaries cannot be violated, which at times helps making the shape stands out more.  The disadvantage is that only words that exactly fit will be accepted, hence potentially leaving some regions completely unfilled.

That's it for now.