I need to start writing my RapidWeaver FAQ so here we go. As always, if you would like to see all FAQs for RapidWeaver or iWeb, use the category links there in the right gutter.

Why do the tags in your RapidWeaver blog tag cloud appear to be sized wrong? Well… unless I’m missing something, RapidWeaver has a bug that’s assigning style classes to your tags incorrectly. Now if you don’t understand HTML or CSS, here’s what that means. When you create a new tag for your blog, RW adds it to the list of tags and then tracks how many times you assign that tag to the entries in your blog. If you assign the tag numerous times, it notes that. If you use it only once, it notes note.

When you publish your site, RW looks at all your tags and then assigns what we call a CSS class to each one based on how many times the tag was used. From what I’ve seen, there are ten classes for tags and they look something like this:

blog-tag-size-1
blog-tag-size-2
blog-tag-size-3

…and so on. These 10 classes were included so theme designers could control the size of the fonts used for the tags in your tag cloud. For example, the tags in your group that you’ve used the most will get the CSS class blog-tag-size-10 and tags that were used only once will get the CSS class blog-tag-size-1. As a theme designer, I’ve added font sizes for each of the ten classes so that any tag with a size of 10 will get a large font size and any tag with a size of 1 will get a much smaller size. If you’ve ever seen a WordPress blog with a tag cloud produced by Ultimate Tag Warrior, then you understand how these are supposed to look. You get a big blob of words (your tags) all in varying sizes (and colors) to indicate their usage.

The problem for the moment however (as of June 12, 2007) in RW 3.6.1 is that RW is not assigning the CSS classes to the tags correctly. I’m getting blog-tag-size-8 or blog-tag-size-9 or even blog-tag-size-10 assigned to tags that were only used once! :-O That’s not right. Sometimes it assigns the tag correctly and sometimes it does not so right now, your Tabouli tag cloud likely does not look as it should. The bug appears to assign the tags incorrectly for tags near the beginning of the alphabet and correctly near the end of the alphabet.

In case you are interested, here are the class styles I’ve applied for the tags. You can see that I increase the font size as the style size increases:


#sidebar ul.blog-tag-cloud {
padding: 0;
margin: 0 0 15px 10px;
list-style: none;
}
#sidebar ul.blog-tag-cloud li {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
display: inline;
}
.blog-tag-size-1 {
font-size: 9px;
}
.blog-tag-size-2 {
font-size: 11px;
}
.blog-tag-size-3 {
font-size: 13px;
}
.blog-tag-size-4 {
font-size: 15px;
}
.blog-tag-size-5 {
font-size: 17px;
}
.blog-tag-size-6 {
font-size: 19px;
}
.blog-tag-size-7 {
font-size: 21px;
}
.blog-tag-size-8 {
font-size: 24px;
letter-spacing: -.05em;
}
.blog-tag-size-9 {
font-size: 27px;
letter-spacing: -.05em;
}
.blog-tag-size-10 {
font-size: 30px;
letter-spacing: -.05em;
}


AND, of course, I have provided full color control for every tag size in the style inspector. One of the neat things about tag clouds is that, when the fonts are colored in shades of one color by size as well, the effect can be very cool. On pages with light backgrounds, color your smallest tags a dark color and then go lighter as the font size increases. On dark pages, color your smallest fonts with a very light color and go darker as the font increases. That will produce a very cool looking tag cloud :)

I’ll post an announcement once the tag cloud class assignments are fixed by Realmac.