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My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator

wispy.me

1–10 of 13 posts

Re: My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator

#4
post #3

Nifty. It always bothered me that Wordle required Java.

Thanks, that's pretty much why I built it, its still not as nice as wordle though, but I had to make a lot of feature/performance trade-offs to get it running at a decent speed.

Re: My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator

#5
Really cool. And you have also shared the technology used in the site. May be you could blog about the development life cycle detailing some of the rationale for selecting a given tech. Kind of like making of Wispy. I am sure many of the us will get benefited out of that.

Re: My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator

#6
post #5

Really cool. And you have also shared the technology used in the site. May be you could blog about the development life cycle detailing some of the rationale for selecting a given tech. Kind of like making of Wispy. I am sure many of the us will get benefited out of that.

I'm planning on doing that, and open sourcing quite a bit of the tools/libraries I had to build myself. The contact page is a little fancy in that it sniffs your browsers feature set via javascript and sends it on to me when you send a message, a huge help with tech support :) Its up on github and linked to on the faq page.

Re: My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator

#7
My twitter account (@vraa) is not protected. But when I tried, I got an error message "Whoops, either that twitter user does not exist, or their account is protected, try someone else.". tried both vraa and @vraa without success!

may be a bug or twitter quota has exceeded?

Re: My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator

#8
My main use of "word cloud" generators (wordle.net in particular) is to take large texts, show all words except the most common, and - this is key - highlight particular words.

Prime example: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1507537/Reservoir_Dogs (the easily offended may refrain)

To do this with Wordle, I have to use a word processor & spreadsheet to count the words, and specify the RGB color for each (all the same except the few I want to stand out, however common/rare). The "common words" removal becomes problematic when the words to highlight are in that removal list (say, when rendering a speech by the Obama to highlight frequency of "I", "my", "me", etc.). Ergo, would be nice to render all words no matter how rare, specify default and per-word colors without marking all, and indicate specific exemptions from the "common words" list.

Re: My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator

#9
post #7

My twitter account (@vraa) is not protected. But when I tried, I got an error message "Whoops, either that twitter user does not exist, or their account is protected, try someone else.". tried both vraa and @vraa without success! may be a bug or twitter quota has exceeded?

It uses jsonp to talk to the twitter api, so if its a rate limit, its on your own ip, are you in a large company or uni by any chance? Otherwise it might just be a slow connection, you dont really know when a jsonp call has failed, so you just have to time it out after a while and assume thats what happened, happens to me every now and again when using it from a phone. If its none of the above, please send me a message using the sites contact form, it tells me a lot about your browser in the process and I can try and replicate the problem.

Re: My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator

#10
I have a few feature requests; mainly because I noticed missing 3 letter words in my own cloud:

  * Add handling for hashtags (overriding the min character length)
  * Slightly more complicated: consider adding click detection on mentions, replies, and hashtags to link to their perspective urls. This would be a very neat addition.
http://www.quora.com/HTML5/Is-it-possible-to-add-links-to-HT...
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