How to add animated tag cloud for blogger blog

"Blogumus" is an Flash based tag cloud widget which uses scripts converted from Roy Tanck's WP Cumulus plugin for Wordpress. Amanda from blogger buster convert this for use in Blogger powered blogs. The result is the widget you can see in action at the top of this post. However your mouse over the Flash object to see the animation begin. In this post, I'll explain how you can add Blogumus to your own Blogger layout with ease!
This widget uses a combination of JavaScript and Flash animation to parse and display your blog labels. Once installed in your template, it should work "out of the box" without any additional tweaking required, though of course you may prefer to change the variables for color, background and size if appropriate :) You should also be able to move the Label Cloud widget through the Page Elements page of your dashboard if you prefer display in a different layout location. To see Blogumus in action, both Flash and Javascript must be installed and enabled for your internet browser. However, it does degrade relatively gracefully, and label links will still be clickable (though not animated) for those who do not use JavaScript of Flash (including search engine spiders).

How to Install on Blogger

Installing Blogumus in your Blogger layout is surprisingly simple! You should only need to copy and paste a section of code to your Blogger template.
Firstly you need to download the following two files and upload them to your hosting server.


and then Go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard, and search for the following line
<b:section class='sidebar' id='sidebar' preferred='yes'>
(or similar)
<b:section-contents id='sidebar-right-1'>
Immediatly after this line, paste the following section of code:
<b:widget id='Label99' locked='false' title='Labels' type='Label'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:title'>
<h2><data:title/></h2>
</b:if>
<div class='widget-content'>
<script src='http://sites.google.com/site/bloggerustemplatus/code/swfobject.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<div id='flashcontent'>Blogumulus by <a href='http://www.roytanck.com/'>Roy Tanck</a> and <a href='http://www.bloggerbuster.com'>Amanda Fazani</a></div>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var so = new SWFObject("http://sites.google.com/site/bloggerustemplatus/code/tagcloud.swf", "tagcloud", "240", "300", "7", "#ffffff");
// uncomment next line to enable transparency
//so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.addVariable("tcolor", "0x333333");
so.addVariable("mode", "tags");
so.addVariable("distr", "true");
so.addVariable("tspeed", "100");
so.addVariable("tagcloud", "<tags><b:loop values='data:labels' var='label'><a expr:href='data:label.url' style='12'><data:label.name/></a></b:loop></tags>");
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");
so.write("flashcontent");
</script>
<b:include name='quickedit'/>
</div>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
Its almost done! :) Then preview your template. If installed correctly, you should see the tag cloud appear in your sidebar. That's all! Now you can customize your blogumus for your own choice. Lets see how can we customize that.

Customizing Blogumus>>

In this default installation, Blogumus includes the following preset variables:

• Width is set to 240px
• Height is set to 300px;
• Background color is white
• Test color is grey
• Font size is "12"

If you would prefer to make your widget wider, shorter, change the color scheme, etc, you will need to do this by editing various parts of the code. I'll go through these options in the order they appear in the widget code. Editing width and height The variables for width and height are found in this line of the script marked as RED.
var so = new SWFObject("http://sites.google.com/site/bloggerustemplatus/code/tagcloud.swf", "tagcloud", "240", "300", "7", "#ffffff");
The width (currently 240) is highlighted in red, while the height (300px default) is highlighted in blue. These numerical values specify the width and height in pixels, so you can alter these of you prefer. Editing background color You can change the background color from white to any other color by altering the hex value in the same line:
var so = new SWFObject("http://sites.google.com/site/bloggerustemplatus/code/tagcloud.swf", "tagcloud", "240", "300", "7", "#ffffff");

For example, if you prefer a bright red background, you may replace #ffffff with #ff0000. Take a look at this page for a list of commonly used hex color codes. Alter the color of text By default, the text is set to display as dark grey ( hex value #333333). You can alter this variable in the following line:
so.addVariable("tcolor", "0x333333");
Be aware that "tcolor" is a Flash variable and doesn't include the usual hash symbol of hex color codes. Be sure to only replace the numbers, not "0x". Otherwise it will not work.!

Credit, Supports and requirements

Blogumus is based on the original WP Cumulus plugin by Roy Tanck, and was converted for use with Blogger layouts by Amanda Fazani on Blogger buster. Please leave the credit links in the widget code intact. These will not be seen by the majority of your blog readers (as they will only display if JavaScript and Flash is not activated) but leaving these links intact is a great way of passing some link love on to Roy for all his hard work, and to inform other Blogger users that they can find the widget codes on this site.

Requirements
For Blogumus to display properly in your template, you will need to have Flash Player 7 or higher. You can download the latest Flash Player plugin for your browser from Adobe. I'm not sure that this installation will support special characters as tags (only Latin characters supported at present). If you do experiecce issues with labels displaying incorrectly, please let me know. I'll try to add more support, but have very little experience using Flash!