I edited the heatmap on my forums to make the smaller tags lighter and the bigger tags darker, this emphasizes the bigger tags and gives a sense of depth in the cloud. Right now i have three levels of color, but it could be easily adapted to use more levels.
In a sort-of unrelated issue, i also added image support to the signatures :).
What do you think?
I quite like the idea of the different colors in the heatmap. The theme overall is quite pleasing to the eye.
I personally don't like having images in the sig, but that's a personal thing. It seems to me that when users have a huge image in their signature, it takes away from the site that they're on and ends up being self-promotion more than anything else. I'm not against self-promotion at all, though. There is a time and a place for everything, and I think the place for something of that nature would be a clearly labeled separate forum.
Very nice though.
Can you give directions for your hacks?
@box, thanks for the comments ... yeah it's really a matter of keeping your users happy because in the end they're the ones that decide if your site gets hits or not :P ... in this particular case, the market - videogame enthusiasts - is one where people tend to identify their tastes in games with signatures... And of course there are regulations on the height and width of the sigs.
@wmarcy, well ... i have the badges system that is a semi-plugin (i'm still learning about it), and this hack ... i edited the bb_get_tag_heat_map function in template-functions to add this code:
if(( $smallest + ( ( $count - $min_count ) * $fontstep ) ) < $smallest+1){
$color = "color:#f9a692;";
}else if(( $smallest + ( ( $count - $min_count ) * $fontstep ) ) <= $largest/2){
$color = "color:#f5795b;";
}else{
$color = "color:#f24c24;";
}right after the
foreach ( $counts as $tag => $count ) {And then i just echoed $color next to $unit; some lines below.
I know it's not the proper way to do it :P but it's how i know, i'm sure someone will come up with a better option for this :P
What would be great (and doable too) is to set a minimum and maximum color, like you can with font size. It can't be too hard... maybe someone can see about pluginatizing (English?) it. I will, if and when I have time.
yeah, it wouldn't be hard ... you'd just do it the same way to do sizes ... but the problem is to make it pass through the intermediate colors. A plugin in wordpress does that but it uses the minimum color for a certain threshold and for the rest the maximum.
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