Monday, May 14, 2007

Update on "Larry's Head in the Clouds"

Ain't the blogosphere a marvellous thing, eh? A while back I asked for some help to turn my label/tag list into a label cloud. Sure enough, a couple people responded. (Which is pretty good, I think, considering that some days only two people actually read Mental Blog...me and HWSRN.)

Static Brain found my post, God knows how cuz she didn't say, but left me a link to Phydeaux3 which has step by step instructions to change the Blogger template and the code you need to do it.

Now, I have this private blog which I use to test new stuff sometimes, so I tried it on there. The cloud worked, except that pieces of the code showed up at the top of the page. So I hesitated. I was leery. Not Timothy Leary, only Somewhat Leery (Timothy's naked half-brother.)

Finally, I just decided to try it out on Mental Blog (since you can preview it without actually setting it in stone (or bits or bytes or whatever this electronicity is set in...) And, by Gawd, it worked! Like a charm.

So now I have my Label Cloud. It's very sparkly. I still don't understand the code, although there are other instructions on the Phydeaux3 page to tweak things if you want. But I did figure out...all by myself...what line to edit that would change the title of the Cloud. I've called it "Cloud-Hidden Whereabouts Unknown" which is the title of a book by Alan Watts, and also a couple of lines in a song by Van Morrison about Alan Watts called, not surprisingly, Alan Watts Blues.

So anyway, thanks to Static Brain for the tip, and also to John Gillespie at Sensitivity to Things, who provided code which looks to me like something which will let me insert an image of my choice in the sidebar. I haven't tried that yet. I'll play with it on the test blog first.

And with this post, I'm introducing a new category to put in the clouds, Link Love, as you can see by the graphic above. I stole that graphic from somebody's blog and I can't remember who, so if you recognize it or if it's yours, let me know. I'll make more Link Love.

Digg! diigo it

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are welcome. Glad I could be of service. If you need any other help feel free to drop on by my site and leave me a message on the tag board or in the comments. Or just drop on by to visit. :-)

Anonymous said...

Oh and umm... If you would like to exchange links with me I would be interest in that. Just let me know by dropping a line on my blog.

John said...

You are of course more than welcome for my all of 5 seconds take a look and make up a hack hack, but it looks like Static Brain's method is probably the tried, tested and officiated way to proceed.

Also, I hope you noticed that you won my inaugural Comment of the Week competition a couple of weeks ago. This weeks contest closes soon... ;-)

MK said...

Hi Larry, regarding that LinK Love logo, I recommend you take a look at this post (http://thenextpost.blogspot.com/2007/03/aint-you-gonna-get-link-love.html) on The NextPost blog.

S. Camille said...

Congrats Larry. Cloud looks good. I've been thinking about putting labels in my sidebar too. Clouds are so pretty... and symbolic too! Sort of like thoughts floating around the mind, lol.

Regarding "Litany Against Fear" I admit to not recalling it directly from reading Dune, but it was passed on to me by someone I was having a conversation with. I liked it and found it a wise way to look at fear. I like to remind myself of things...
I did try to read Dune once while I was in the middle of an intense 2 year contract of 10-12 hour days. I would come home at night and read a couple of pages and then fall asleep. After 3 or 4 months of this I hadn't gotten past the half way point and I decided to give up. So although I know who the Bene Gesserit are, I don't directly recall the poem from the book. But it works for me nonetheless.

Thank you for your comment. It felt brotherly.

Kind regards,
Camille

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