Edward Terry’s Tweet3D lets you few any Twitter user’s most frequent topics as a 3D tag cloud. I’m not quite sure what kind of (undoubtably very clever) magic goes on behind the screens, but it appears that the topics are frequently used words. Somehow, Tweet3D extracts these from previous tweets and passes them to Cumulus to be displayed. Pretty nifty stuff!
Igor A. Melekhine recently sent me a modified version of my Youtuber plugin that adds a ‘high quality’ checkbox to the options page. When checked, Youtuber will attempt to play all videos in the superior MP4 format. Not only will this improve video quality, it’s also the only way to get stereo sound. I’ve incorporated Igor’s changes into a new version, 1.4. Available from your local wordpress.org now.
Thanks Igor, Novastar sounds so much better in high quality.
I just checked the download stats on the WP-Cumulus page at wordpress.org, and saw that the plugin has been downloaded over ten thousand times. Unfortunately, I have no idea how many people downloaded it from this blog before I moved it to the WordPress server, but the total number of users is probably even higher.
10,000 downloads is insignificant when compared to the hundreds of thousands downloads registered for some other plugins, but i’m pretty excited that so many people have taken the time to give WP-Cumulus a try.
Yannick Lejeune has ported WP-Cumulus to Typepad. Aptly named Tumulus, the snippet of code can be downloaded from Yannick’s site. One more step towards world domination (insert evil laughter here)… 
For as long as I remember, WordPress has had the option to send an automatic email to the admin whenever someone posts a comment. I used to have that option enabled. I love responding to comments right away. It helps keep discussions alive and it helps to keep you blog clean of any spam that might slip through Akismet. With the succes of WP-Cumulus however, the volume of comments has been increasing steadily, and I’ve had to disable comment notification.
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I would not have thought it to be possible, but Amanda has succeeded in porting WP-Cumulus to Blogger. She’s written a short tutorial on how to set it up, which is surprisingly easy to do. I haven’t used Blogger since 2003, and wouldn’t have known where to start. So thanks Amanda!
If you’re a Blogger user and you want to catch up with what’s been happening with the WordPress version, click here.
A few days ago I got a comment asking me whether I would release the source files for my Nabaztag Flash movie I created when I first got my wifi bunny. I couldn’t think of a single reason not to, so here they are…
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Tagnetic Poetry is another experiment using Flash to display your blog’s tag cloud. It was Merel Zwart who came up with the brilliant idea to mimic magnetic poetry. Because it re-uses most of the code used in WP-Cumulus, the 0.8 version should already be pretty stable.
I’ve written before about how hard it is to find a good hosting provider, and how Ipowerweb and Hosting Zoom didn’t quite work for me. It’s hard to get good advice with all the lucrative referral programs, which seem to have spawned a whole genre of fake hosting review websites. That’s why I thought I’d share my experiences with Pair Networks. If you’re looking for a good, reliable host and are willing to spend a bit more, I suggest you read on.
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One of the major shortcomings of Flash (imho) is the way it handles text. If you want to animate text, change its transparency or do any of the other things that Flash is so good at, you need to embed font characters into your movie. This is usually not so bad, if you know the target language your movie will be used to display.
My WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin however can be used to display tags in any language. Embedding all available characters would render the plugin unusable, as even the relatively simple Latin character set adds almost 30 kilobytes to the movie’s file size. This is why in order to use the plugin for other languages, you’ll need to add the appropriate characters yourself (or find someone who already has). Here’s how. It’s really quite easy.
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