OK, this is pretty cool. I read a posting over at Lifehacker about Tagxedo, a webapp for generating word clouds. These have been around for awhile – another popular one is Wordle. Basically, a word cloud creates a graphic representation of the words entered into it, either by typing, copying & pasting, or just pointing it to a URL on the web. In the Tags section of this blog you can see a similar idea, but no where near as fun to look at!

The idea is that the more a word shows up in the text, the larger its word cloud equivalent will be. So, for example, in this shot I simply input the address of this blog. Since most of the postings on the main page currently have to do with menagerie as well as several about our TWIRL radio shows, these terms stand out.

Over at Tugxedo, I put in the same address, and got slightly different results. Among other things, it looks like the Tugxedo one picks up the names of the post authors (most of which are me!), so that shows up larger. And every time you try, you get different results.

Anyway, it’s fun to play with. Tagxedo lets you save the results as a file. Wordle only appears to let you upload to their gallery, but either way it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, innit?

The wonders of a Friday night with no show…

No matter how many hours or years I spend on the computer, mostly online, I’m still always surprised at how many hours and years I can spend on the computer, mostly online. I get very easily distracted and before I know it I’m 12 more tabs away from what I was originally reading or working on.  I love tabbed browsers, but they have their cost!

Recently found 2 tools that may help a lot if I can remember to use them. Readability is a tool that removes pretty much all but the text on a web page, and formats it to your liking for easy reading. Try it and see if it doesn’t help!

Quietube does a similar thing for videos. Just use the bookmark while you’re on a YouTube page, and it will show you the video without all the rest of the page behind it. Granted, if you’re out just browsing for things to look at or listen to, or are in an exploring mode, these tools will be at cross purposes, but if there’s something you want to concentrate on, they are great!

Song clip

Here’s another clip from an early mix for the new CD. This one, Lonely Like That, is one of the quieter songs on the CD, and features guest-Grandson Alan MacEwen on trumpet.

Lonely Like That (early mix, clip)

We’re in the mixing stages now, with almost all recording finished. As always, time and money are slowing things down – never enough of either – but it’s coming together. Thanks very much to the folks who have made donations toward the completion of this behemoth – I hope you’ll love the results! We’re looking at a few fund-raising opportunities to help finish the thing up, so I’ll let you know about that as soon as I figure it out!