So quick tutorial on how to build a tag cloud in Rails. Hurray for logarithms lately. They are all over the search code.

Criteria :
- Use percent based fonts to display size
- Sizes should be relative (high search popularity doesn’t make HUGE text)
- Top 25 should be displayed randomly, even though we are sorting by the most popular.

So here goes:

In your controller, get your search:

@popular_searches = Search.find(:all, :limit => 25,  rder => 'popularity DESC')
@popular_searches = @popular_searches.sort_by { rand }

The last line shuffles/randomizes the entries even though we sorted by popularity.

Next for the view. The min/max could probably stand to be in the controller, but since it is just for display, I have no qualms putting it in the view.

<%
pmin = 100 # Minimum font size
pmax = 400 #Maximum font size
vmin = 10000000000000 #Super large number to init min
vmax = -1000000000000 #Super small number to init max
for search in @popular_searches
	if (search.popularity  vmax)
		vmax = search.popularity
	end
end
%>

<a href="/search/?q="
style="font-size:%"
title="Search"&gt;</a>

So the tag font size is a function of the min popularity, the max popularity, the maximum size, minimum size, and the popularity for the specific tag. This will generate you a nice little tag list.

Sources: Tagging math, randomizing Active Record set
The finished product is in beta on the Adamantine Arts search

I really like my middle name “Flynn” and started including it on my business cards and such. When I redesigned this site last week, I added my middle name to all the spots where I was using my first and last name. But then when I checked my page rank for searches for “Blaine Garrett”, I could not longer even find this site.

However, when I searched for “Blaine Flynn Garrett”, “Blaine Flynn”, or “Flynn Garrett” this page came up in the top two results. This leads me to believe that the adjacency of words plays a role in results. Very odd.

As a result, I removed “Flynn” from all over the site. I figure people that will have my full name got it from a business card, etc and thus have the site address too. Otherwise, they got my name off of a gallery tag, forum post, word of mouth etc, and I want them to be able to easily find me. Now I just need GoogleBot to update…