In this new post to the Ibuildings blog, Ivo Jansch talks about the recent experience he had attending the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, CA.

I was invited to this conference by Microsoft (thanks Bram!) because Microsoft is opening up to the PHP community, and I must say that so far they haven't disappointed me.

He talks about what Microsoft had to show off including Azure, a cloud operating system that, in the future will be adapted to allow PHP applications to be run on it.

Douglas Brown has put together an announcement for a web service he's come up with (and made available for download) to make a tag cloud out of the top keywords from your twitter feed.

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.

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to set up a tag cloud for your site:

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 the Oracle users out there looking for an easy way to pull those tags together and make a handy little cloud out of them, Maggie Nelson has posted about a simple Oracle function that can help - NTILE.

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).

In this tutorial on the LotsOfCode website, the author looks to help you create a feature common to several (including this one) websites out there - a tag cloud.

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.

Jonathan Snook points out a new take on working with tags on a site - a focus cloud.

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.

As pointed out in this post on the Zend Developer Zone, the tag cloud can be a valuable tool to any site using tags for its articles/posts. They also mention a tutorial to help you build one.

Well, it's actually so simple it's not really a tutorial at all so much as a snippet with a bit of explanation. But I've had some people ask how it's done, so here's how I do it. I tried to go through and add some comments about what's happening.

The code pulls the information from a backend database and calculates out what size each of the items needs to be based on the max and min values set in the script.