February 14, 2006

The scavenger hunt

It’s always interesting what you find when you go hunting early in the morning :p Today, I was deleting a few spam comment entries in my blog when the Incoming Links section caught my eye. So I took a look at the sites linking to me and one of those sites, came across TagCloud. This particular site only had a tag cloud but no information as to how to get one. However, I knew they were a WordPress site based on the links on their site and so I began doing a Google search for WordPress and TagCloud. So, by way of an entry on the WordPress support forums, I arrived at the TagCloud site that I already linked to :p

This of course, started me off on a whole new tangent. I had to learn what tag clouds were, how to implement them and how I could set one of my own up on my site. I signed up for their service and created my own cloud. I added my own RSS feed and then had to pause to wonder what else I could add. I first added an RSS feed from dictionary.com but didn’t like how that looked. My favourite wordsmith site is of course, wordsmith.org – I’ve been a subscriber to Word-A-Day for longer than I can remember 🙂 So I decided to see if they had an RSS feed, and what do you know, they did! So I added that to my cloud and I was happy for the moment – but not totally happy since my site by itself was still not appearing on the tag cloud. They say that it takes a few minutes to be indexed but nothing was happening even after 10 minutes. Oh well, guess I’ll have to check on that tomorrow :p

In the meantime, going through the stuff at TagCloud, I came across a reference to GreaseMonkey. So over to that page I went and in reading up about GreaseMonkey’s capabilities, I came across a link to the Coral Content Distribution Network. Now a friend of mine, Nige, has been having a lot of trouble lately because his site keeps on getting featured on digg and going down due to heavy load. This seemed like the perfect solution for the issues that he’d been facing. So I dashed off the link to him. Another problem resolved (or at least a potential solution discovered) all within the course of half an hour of aimless web surfing. Ah, the wonders of the Internet :p

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Posted by Fahim at 8:10 am  |  No Comments