Weighting RSS

I now wanted to make certain tags bubble up even though their weren’t many posts on it.  I started by giving a weight to the tags and then tallying that rather then the number of posts associated.  I fine tuned the sizes of the tags in the display based on the maximum weight of the unread posts, rather then hard coded ranges.  I didn’t want to make the weights limited 1 to 10.  I wanted to see where the right limit was organically, right now the largest weight I applied for a tag is 40 so that [newsflash] from fark.  I find the [newsflash] from fark a better gauge of importance for me then anything brittney related in CNN’s top stories feed.  I also gave lego 20 since not many posts are made about lego and patent got10.

Here’s the logic as the code works to figure out the tags size.  (d = maxweight / 4)

Tag Weight	Style	Font-Size
= 1	smallest	.4em
> 1 and < d	small	.4em
>=d and < (d*2)	medium	1em
>=(d*2) and < maxweight	large	1.5em
=maxweight	largest	2em, and all caps

This created a number of really small tags that weren’t very important and was making the tag cloud to large for my tastes.  So I had the code stop writing out any tag that where the stye was small or smallest.  I’ll post a video soon so you can see that this made the tag cloud create a dynamic effect that I didn’t really plan but has worked out great.  As you read the posts associated with the highest weighted tag and remove it from consideration, the maxweight is redefined and the cloud is redisplayed.  This worked out great until about weight < 10 where there were just to many tags being set to medium and above.  I now have hardcoded lows,  maxweight !< 10 and d !< 5.  At this point I know that most of these post aren’t really important to me but I can pick and choose those that interest me and possibly weight them higher for later.

After awhile I missed knowing if a tag had a lot of posts or not, so I implemented a second level indicator based on color of the tag.  This lets me pick and choose the smaller tags that have a lot of posts and when I’m presented with a large tag cloud. 

Posts	Style	Color
< 3	low	faint blue
>= 3 and < 7	medium	faint green
>= 7 and < 10	big	blue
>=10 and < 20	high	purple
> 20	huge	red

 

This all happen in about two weeks of development usually at about 1-2 hour intervals that I had time to work from home. 

Feed Weights

When I clicked on a tag to show the posts I have them listed in descending chronological order, which is my preferred reading style.  I noticed that that was making the me too posts bubble up to the top of the list.  I tend to like to read posts from certain feeds over others so I implemented weights to feeds also.  I included the feed weight into the tag cloud calculation as a multiplicative of the tag weight.  These I’m trying to keep between 1 and 5.  I also now have the posts ordered by weight and then descending chronological order.  I’ve been toying with the idea of reversing the chronological order but just haven’t got to it yet.  I’ve got Techcrunch weighted at 5 and if they make a post with a patent category the weight in the tag cloud will be 50, which will make the patent tag bubble up to the top.

I’ve had other ideas like placing the certain feeds favicon under the tag showing that a specific blog posted about it but I don’t think it will have much worth and might overly clutter the cloud.