Wordle: Capture your blog in a single picture

Wordle is an interesting little web-based toy that creates a "word cloud" from text you provide. Words that appear more often in the text appear larger in the finished cloud.

One of the most interesting ways to use this toy, is to provide a blog or feed as the form of input. For example, the following word cloud was created using the feed from this blog :

Picture from Wordle

As you can tell from the word cloud, I've been doing a lot of Batman related posts recently. For someone like me, who uses this blog for a variety of things, it's interesting to see some reoccurring themes.

A bleaker example of a word cloud can be seen from this word-cloud I created using the BBC Front-Page News feed:

It could be fun to use this with your twitter feeds, to find out what people are tweeting about. Or with Facebook status updates. You could output your music as text from iTunes and then create a word cloud to represent your musical taste.

Make your own word cloud using Wordle and link to it in the comments.

Welcome back!

Oh, hello reader. You’d better have a seat.

Now, perchance you were a devoted reader of my blog in it’s original incarnation, or perhaps you a brand new reader whose web browser has magically sent you to this very page. No matter what the journey you have taken to get here: I bid thee welcome.

I’ll start of by promising nothing.
Anyone who promises to post “as often as possible”, or indeed “every day” on their very first blog post is putting a lot of responsibility on themselves. I will only say that I shall update whenever I feel as if I have something worthwhile to comment on. That way, I feel no need to grovel about lack of updates if I decide to take a 3 month hiatus from updating

So what can you expect to find here? Expect quite a diverse blog, everything from Theatre to Computer Science, and a generous helping of everything in between. Some posts may involve images, others may even involve moving images (...video). I also have a few surprises up my sleeve, so look out for them too ;-)


What really makes this blog worthwhile is the comments and feedback I get from it. So, be bold and make some comments! Better yet, send me an email, letter, telegram or generic winged-messenger-beast to tell me what you think, or make some suggestions.