Blogumulus Not Working:The Complete Fix

Recently a lot of people have been  complaining that after successful installation of Blogumulus,the flash based tag cloud doesnt animate or worse is showing some kind of pluggin missing error.When people tried to click on the address all they could see was this:

A more careful observation revealed that the error was some access related issue with Amazon’s S3 storage services.This can easily be fixed by moving the tagcloud.swf and the swfobject.js files to another hosting service.So all you need to do is to replace :
http://halotemplates.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-cumulus-example/swfobject.js 

      with 

http://mopheat.site40.net/recources/tagcloud/swfobject.js 

And Replace :

http://halotemplates.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-cumulus-example/tagcloud.swf

with  

http://mopheat.site40.net/recources/tagcloud/tagcloud.swf

Just replace those 2 files and take a preview of uour template & you can see that your Blogumulus is back to life again , following the mouse cursors movements again,as if it has got a new life.Remember if Blogumulus ever fails to load again,then the issue has to be with the file hosting service.So make sure the links are alive.Njoy!!!!Hope you liked this post.Feel free to comment.

Flash Tag Cloud-Blogumulus: How to Install In The Easy Way

For those of who don know what Blogumulus is you can refer my article here.Blogumulus is the alternative of Roy Tanck’s WP Cumulus exclusively made for blogger.Its a flash based tag cloud which uses the same script as that of Cumulus.A lot of people expressed their concern in installing this, as it was thought that this pluggin could be less SEO friendly.But as the time progressed,results showed otherwise & it became a part of every bloggers gadget.There are a lot of methods which are available in the internet which explains how to install them.However the method which I am prescribing will overcome the One N only problem Blogumulus users can face after its installation.Its the Access issue associated with Amazon s3.Even if it occurs it can be easily fixed by moving your tagcloud.swf and the swfobject.js files to another hosting service.Don worry ill be using another hosting service other than Amazon so your Blogumulus will be running 24*7 365 days a year..So lets begin the installation:
1)First & Foremost make sure that  the widget label has been attached.If not, then select Page Elements >> Add a Page Element and select the label.
2)Then go to your Design >>Edit Html and click on Expand Widgets.
3) Now look for this piece of code:
<b:section class=’sidebar’ id=’sidebar’ preferred=’yes’>
 Sometimes,this piece of code may not be available in the template.If  you are unable to find this piece of code,then try to find the following piece of code:
  <div class=’widget-content’>
    <data:adCode/>
    <b:include name=’quickedit’/>
  </div>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
Now immediately after this code paste the code from here  
Now preview the template.If everything went according to plan,you will see the stylized flash tag cloud  animating under your mouse cursor.Now save the template and lets continue with our customizable properties of this template.
Customizable Features:
By default the remplate comes with the following features:
Width is set to 240 px;
Height is set to 200 px;
Background Color is #e1ecfe(As i had to merge it with my adsense color)
Text Color is Blue(#0000ff) in my case.
Font is 12 px
 Lets take a deeper look:
1)For adjusting height &Width:

var so = new SWFObject(&quot;http://mopheat.site40.net/recources/tagcloud/tagcloud.swf&quot;, &quot;tagcloud&quot;, &quot;240&quot;, &quot;200&quot;, &quot;7&quot;, &quot;#e1ecfe&quot;);

Here 200 corresponds to the height,240 corresponds to the width and #e1ecfe corresponds to my background color.
2)To Change  Font color:

so.addVariable(&quot;tcolor&quot;, &quot;0x0000ff&quot;);

 Replace 0x0000ff  with the appropriate font color.Mind it!This is flash so use Hexadecimal colors ,dont use color names.
3)To Adjust Font Size:
so.addVariable(&quot;tagcloud&quot;, &quot;<tags><b:loop values=’data:labels’ var=’label’><a expr:href=’data:label.url’ style=’12′><data:label.name/></a></b:loop></tags>&quot;);
Here you can adjust the font size by changing the value 12 with the appropriate one.Always make sure to preview your template to make sure that things are in order.
I Do hope that you didnt encounter any problems during the installation.Incase you did,feel free to comment & ill get back to you at the earliest.Till then Happy BLoggiN

Blogumulus:The Animated Tag Cloud

A few years back,a revolution took place in the blogger domain,where people moved out of the dull label gadget in the blogger page element & moved on to create tag clouds which are way better than the former ones.These clouds are more customizable than the custom labels and it quickly spread like fire in the blogger war.Web 2.0 has to be credited with the advent of tag clouds,which are nothing but hyperlinks which leads a group of collective items.Tags clouds were a part of research conducted by the Web 2.0 people who had this to say :
Tag size: Large tags attract more user attention than small tags (effect influenced by further properties, e.g., number of characters, position, neighboring tags).
Scanning: Users scan rather than read tag clouds.
Centering: Tags in the middle of the cloud attract more user attention than tags near the borders (effect influenced by layout).
Position: The upper left quadrant receives more user attention than the others (Western reading habits).
Exploration: Tag clouds provide suboptimal support when searching for specific tags (if these do not have a very large font size).
                                               Now another revolution took place in blogger with the advent of flash N javascript enabled tag cloud which is not only animated,but also it can follow the mouse pointers motion & is completely operatable.Thus came BLOGUMULUS:The next generation tag clouds.Blogumulus is just the blogger version of and also the davanced version of Roy Tanck’s WP Cumulus plugin for WordPress.Incase you are searching for tutorial on how to add it to your website or blog you can find the tutorial here.I have also covered how to customize them so that you can make them blend in with your site.