[TIPS] tagcloud on your webpage

It's been tough trying to find a way to collect your favorite links for your students. You can get them all in one place, but then trying to organize them is tricky. Let's look at one way to display your organized bookmarks on your website using a tagroll on del.icio.us.

http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls

First you set up your own del.icio.us account. Then, grab a toolbar or extension from this page: http://del.icio.us/help/ Grab the right one for your browser and drop it onto your Links toolbar. From then on, when you see a page that you want to keep, just click that button and it will guide you through adding it to your del.icio.us account.

The KEY to this whole thing is how you TAG your links. You'd like to tag them with multiple tags when applicable, but you don't want to go crazy with them, either. For example, a site about Saturn would rightfully be cross-tagged with Science, space, and perhaps planets. But, a site that lets you edit digital photos could be filed under digital, photos, photography, editing, etc etc. The result is that it's filed in TOO MANY places.

Finally, once you've gone through your favorite sites and added them to your del.icio.us account with the tags you're comfortable with, grab the code from the http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls page and add it to your site. You will then see a tag cloud (if you so choose) that contains all your tag words, with the more popular tags being in larger sizes and/or colors. So, when your students are sent to find a site, you would just say, "On my page, click the 'planets' tag. In there you'll find my link to ...."

Oh, you can add that to your blog or to your Moodle class, as well. You could even choose to have a Linkroll (http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls) instead.