links for 2008-04-15

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TagCrowd: Visualize Word Frequencies in Web Pages and Documents...

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It looks like this has been up since last summer, but today was the first I have heard of TagCrowd. TagCrowd is a web based tool that allows you to visualize word frequencies as a tag cloud. You can visualize web pages, text files, and contents of your clipboard and then embed the tag cloud in your page. This could be great for teachers to use to visualize frequently used vocabulary from text sources. Amazon has a similar feature, concordance, for books that are searchable in their Search Inside feature, but TagCrowd allows you to do this with any text. The example below is from the freely available (in public domain) text of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain at the University of Virginia.

TagCrowd was created by Daniel Steinbock, a doctoral student in Design and Education at Stanford University. You can read more about TagCrowd, and some interesting uses ideas, on the TagCrowd Blog...

By way of NancyW and Twitter...

TagCrowd Example: The 100 most frequently found words in Tom Sawyer available at the University of Virginia...

created at TagCrowd.com

FancyZoom

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Cabel Sasser is a software developer and one of the founders of Panic Software, the folks that make Transmit along with some other nice web development tools. Transmit is a great FTP utility for the Mac and a tool that I find myself using just about everyday. Cabel also does some other coding and his weblog, cabel.name is a good read for folks who like to keep up with smart independent software developers. (If you are interested in software design, his talk from C4 is very informative and entertaining...) This morning, David Warlick pointed to a nice little piece of Javascript that Cabel wrote that produces a nice visual effect when viewing images that have been posted to your web site. He calls it FancyZoom. Basically when a thumbnail link is clicked a larger version of the image appears as a call out. A very nice effect. Below is an example. Click the image to see the effect.

nando


Playing with WordPress 2.5

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I finally updated my WordPress install to 2.5 for this blog, and several of my school blogs. So far things are working well. I like the new interface. It is a lot lighter and cleaner. I also like the new Gallery feature for uploading images. An example of which you can see below.


links for 2008-04-11

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