Adventures By Design

A Wordle word cloud of my strengths.

Yesterday, I continued our redesign (or at least revision) of our blog. There are a bunch of things I want to change, although I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to do so. I wonder if this sudden need to make our blog more user family-friendly is just an online version of the fabled Nesting Instinct.

In my online travels, I stumbled on Sue at Blog Mum’s post about the difference between tags and categories. She quotes Lorelle: “I think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the index page of a book.” That’s a good description that instantly changed the way I think about our blog’s organization. Thanks, Lorelle (and Sue).

I’ve read lots of what Lorelle’s written, especially when I was first learning about Wordpress, but unfortunately since moving to China, I haven’t been able to check out her, or anyone else’s, Wordpress blog. Anything with the domain name Wordpress.com is blocked. So is blogspot (sorry Deb). Facebook is occassionally, although not recently. Google in all its incarnations (gmail, calendar, docs) was blocked recently, must to the frustration of nearly everyone I know (except those with a VPN). Flickr too. Edublogs is usually, although I randomly checked last week and it was up.

Anyways, Sue had an attractive tag cloud image. I asked her how she made it (blogs are so cool for talking to strangers), and she pointed me to a site called Wordle. Above you can see my Wordle cloud for the text of the Finding My Strengths post. Pretty cool, eh?