The problem I was having was actually judging whether or not it would be worth my time following their tweets. I mean, I follow someone that is really respected in a certain field, only to find out that they tweet about their new puppy they just got more than anything. So I made a PHP script that generates a "Twitter Tag Cloud." Using this, you can generate your own Twitter tag cloud to put on your personal site to display the top keywords that you have been tweeting about.

You can either check out an example of the cloud through the form in the post, use his REST service to get the keywords for a user or you can download his code and try it out for yourself.

Anyhow, one annoying thing about SimpleXML has to do with caching. When using web services, we often cache the contents we get back. We were having a problem where we would get an error about a SimpleXML node not existing.

They were using memcache to store the information but came across problems when their code tried to use a (sometimes) empty tag. He gives two solutions - one using a recursive function that identifies the empty items and the other that encodes then decodes the object to and from JSON, keeping the values intact.

Every major website seems to have a tag cloud. Users love tag clouds; they help navigate masses of content quickly and easily. [...] How do we actually build a tag cloud at application level? In this tutorial, I'll take you through putting together a full-blown, calculated web 2.0 tag cloud in PHP.

They start at the end, with an example cloud with some sample tags ("php" being the largest, of course). The code for it is pretty simple - it looks at an array of counts, the number of times the tag is used, and builds the links with the correct font size automatically.

For example, check out the documentation for the NTILE Function. Yeah, sounds kind of boring. What good could it be in the wonderful world of web development? After all, who manages employee or sales tables anymore... Answer: generating tag clouds.

Her SQL statement categorizes the tags for you automatically, dropping them in to "buckets" of font sizes. This makes it simple to loop through them (like with a foreach) and output your tags with a little help from some CSS. You can even specify how many buckets you want it to fill (how many different tag values to get and compare).

We will first learn how block plug-ins can be used in your templates, and then learn how to create our own. Once we know how to create a block plug-in, we will cover a practical example that will show you how block plug-ins can effectively be used in your own web sites.

The tutorial assumes that you already have Smarty installed and that you're familiar enough with it to know how to work with the plug-in system right away. They include some samples of how it can be used (a default block, formatting it with HTML) and, of course, how to integrate this (PHP code and all) into your template and push your content into it.

So as many of you are certainly well aware, the long awaited Wordpress v2.3 was released today after a long series of betas and release candidates. 2.3 has had the blogging community foaming at the mouth for one reason: tags.

He spends a bit explaining what these tags are and what they're useful for before getting into the actual experience with the new update. He talks about issues he came across (updating/replacing plugins with ones of the new version) and the updates he needed to make to his theme to allow for his customizations to still work as planned.

In this tutorial i am going to show you how to create a basic word / tag cloud using php. I am going to create a class based cloud, this is because it will be more convenient for people to adapt it on there own websites, if you don't know much about class based programming then click here to take a look at the class tutorial.

They pull the information from their "words array" (where words can be dynamically added to it) and use a percentage rating to base the CSS size for the data's span tag. The entire class listing is provided in one big chunk to make copy and paste easy.

With this fairly broad classification I set about working out exactly what a Focus Cloud should show. To me the name could only suggest one thing. It shows the area which currently is receiving the most Focus! [...] So a Focus Cloud should show not what has been the most popular tags overall, but what is the most popular tags at present. What is your current focus.

The post not only includes the theory behind these focus clouds but also has some PHP code to back it up (using the del.icio.us interface and tags as the foundation of the cloud's contents). The full code for the cloud can be grabbed here.

But how can I use these wonderful custom feeds, you ask? Well, it's simple really. Just take your pick of the multitude of tags the articles on this site have and pick the ones you want. Then, just stick them on the end of the feed URL like so:

• http://www.phpdeveloper.org/feed/tag/job
• http://www.phpdeveloper.org/feed/tag/tutorial
• http://www.phpdeveloper.org/feed/tag/secunia

• http://www.phpdeveloper.org/feed/tag/tutorial+zendframework
• http://www.phpdeveloper.org/feed/tag/ajax+php5

We will run a live report from the conference on www.zend.com, and through our blogs, devzone, flickr and del.icio.us. All of you who are at the conference and are creating content about it in any form, please use the tag "zendconference2006". All of you who are not at the conference, check in regularly at zend.com, Zend's blog, Zend Developer Zone, Technorati, Flickr, and/or Del.icio.us.

Cal also comments that you can also tag things with "upcomming:event=111293" on Flickr to let the upconing.org website to catch it and associate it with the event.