Building Tag Cloud (2): Limit the tags!

(if you haven’t read the first section, read it now!)

So, you already have a tag cloud. However, if you keep add new tags, you will face a problem sometimes in the future. Yes, your tag cloud is becoming larger and you are trapped into information flood, one thing we want to avoid. Take this as an example:

… and the tag cloud is bigger than what my screen can show. You will hardly found what you want easily. Compare this with what Flickr does by limiting the number of tags in tag cloud.

So the first lesson is limit the number of tags in your tag cloud.

Here is an algorithm that can be used. As an input you need another parameter n which tell how many tags you want to display.

1. Sort the tags by the number of tag occurences
2. Cut n most used tags and throw the others
3. Build the tag cloud using algorithm we have discussed in the first section

It should be no hard for experienced programmer like you .

[continue to the next section]

Related posts:

1. Building Tag Cloud (1): Tag Cloud is both easy and hard!
2. Building Tag Cloud (3): Tag Cloud on fixed space