Yay I got a Zeitgeist ........ whatever the hell one of them is .... personally I call it a search cloud, it's far easier to spell In the true spirit of OpenSourceSoftware I stole the idea off Whoo and decided to see how easy it would be to create a b₂evolution plugin that did the same thing. It's probably taken me longer to write this post than it took to code it

How does it work ?

It's pretty simple really, the plugin scurries through your hitlog and finds all of the hits that have been flagged as coming from a search engine. It takes all these hits and meanders off to count them, grabs a beer and a smoke and then ambles back with a cloud ready to be slapped on your blog. If it's enabled then you should see a cloud below the first post on the first page of my blog, the font-size indicates how often that search term was used to find my tacky lil pad

If any of you fancy having a pre-release play with it then you can steal it from here (we've now released version 1.0 of the plugin on Sourceforge ), unzip/upload/install it and then add the following skintag to your skins _main.php

Code:

You can pretty much throw that anywhere in your skins main, even inside your post loop as it defaults to only showing once per page. There's a couple of parameters you can use :

1. blog : spookily enough this is the blog ID that you want to show the cloud for. The default is to use the current blogs id. If you set it to 1 then it will show all hits for all blogs
2. show_once : by setting this to false you can display more than one cloud, the default is to only show once

If you want to play with the styling then just take a root around in the plugins source and you'll see all the classnames it uses, you can even play with the html it produces to bend it to your will. The chances are that most of that bit will become params by the time the release version comes out.

That's pretty much it really. As always if you find any bugs or want to send me the odd million quid then feel free to leave a comment
¥