It was upgrade weekend for the blog, meaning I had my eyes turned under the
hood and my fingers in the blog code Friday into Saturday (today, all reading,
responding, and figuring grades).

I was running MT3.2, growing every day more envious of those who were putting
to use the tagging features built into 3.3+. The upgrade was a cinch.
Just FTPed the files into place and logged in. The config file didn’t need
any changes. Well, it didn’t require any changes, that is, until I also
converted the database from MySQL4 to MySQL5. For that, I had to add a
DBSocket line to the config file. I had not a clue about it at the time,
but the support folks at icdsoft.com are remarkably good.

That’s a hearty new cumulus tagcloud over at the left. There’s a lot to
be said for MT’s tagging features built into the latest versions. Now I can merge
tags across the entire weblog, sort by tags (for editing or adding new companion
tags), and grade the tags with a max="x" setting. That’s the statement I use
to come up with ten levels for the tag cloud. And I’ve set the CSS to
display:none for the bottom five (#6-10). That way only the top five levels show
up, and the cloud isn’t the size of Lake Michigan.

I also had to downgrade the search template that came along with MT3.4 (maybe
3.3, too). By default, the new search template for MT works with the wonky
style sheets that came with 3.2+. I’m still using a frame-sy template from
all the way back to 2.65, but I like it. Rather than upgrade the style
sheet, I retro-graded the template. Matters very little in the end, I
suppose. But I really like the way the new MT processes the tag families (The
Confluent’s), listing entries for a particular tag and also listing the
other tags attached to each respective entry.

For anyone pilfering the internets for pieces of stray code, here’s how I’ve
done my tagcloud (in Movable Type 3.4)

Create a module named "cloud." Copy what’s here into it. Depending on
your main style sheet, your sidetitle div might be different.:

<div class="sidetitle">Tagcloud</div>
<div id="cloud">
<MTTags>
<a href="<$MTTagSearchLink$>" class="tag<$MTTagRank max="10"$>"><$MTTagName$></a>
</MTTags>
</div>

<!–Optional tag count in parentheses–>
<!– (<$MTTagCount$>)–>

Into the main template:

<$MTInclude module="cloud"$>

And into the main style sheet:
I should note that this is still very much a work-in-progress. It should
give you a general sense of what I’ve done.

/*#########Tag Cloud########*/

#cloud
{font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
padding-top: 1px;
line-height:80%;
text-align:center;
padding-bottom:8px;
border-bottom: 4px solid #E7E6E6;
}

#cloud a {text-decoration:none;
padding:0px;}

#cloud A { text-decoration: none; }
#cloud A:link { text-decoration: none; }
#cloud A:visited { text-decoration: none; }
#cloud A:active { color: #FFCC66; }
#cloud A:hover { color: #FFCC66; }

a.tag10{
font-size:6px;
display:none;
color: #E7E8EB;
font-weight:700;
}

/*display:none designates which of the levels of tags (corresponding to
the max="10" statement in the module) will actually show up in the cloud.*/

a.tag9{
font-size:7px;
display:none;
color: #E7E8EB;
font-weight:900;
}

a.tag8{
font-size:8px;
display:none;
color: #E7E8EB;
font-weight:700;
}

a.tag7{
font-size:9px;
display:none;
color: #E7E8EB;
font-weight:900;
}

a.tag6{
font-size:9px;
display:none;
color: #E7E8EB;
font-weight:700;
}
a.tag5 {
font-size:10px;
color: #C0C5D3;
font-weight:500;
}

a.tag4 {
font-size:11px;
color: #C0C5D3;
font-weight:700;
}

a.tag3 {
font-size:13px;
color: #647094;
font-weight:900;
}

a.tag2 {
font-size:15px;
color: #081B55;
font-weight:600;
}

a.tag1 {
font-size:17px;
color: #081B55;
font-weight:700;
}
/*The font-weights here still need fine-tuning.*/

That’s it. To settle on a range of hex codes, I used
color blender. With the new version of Movable Type, all of what’s shown here is supported without any plugins. I mention this because I spent a frustrated half-hour messing around with Cloudnine before I realized it was obsolete and another frustrated half-hour wondering why the tags weren’t showing up before I realized I had some other ineffective old tagging plugin still hanging around in my installation.