

My Hobby Project: Wispy, a canvas powered word cloud generator - seanodonnell
http://wispy.me
HTML5 Canvas powered, with a flash fallback so it even supports ie6 (very slow on it though). Supports twitter, facebook, and pasting in anything you like.
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seanodonnell
HTML5 Canvas powered, with a flash fall-back so it even supports ie6 (very
slow on it though). Supports Twitter, Facebook, and pasting in anything you
like.

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ctdonath
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.

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machupai
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.

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seanodonnell
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.

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jqueryin
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...](http://www.quora.com/HTML5/Is-it-possible-to-add-links-to-HTML5-Canvas-
graphics)

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seanodonnell
At present wispy ignores all 3 letter words, apart from a small list
considered "non boring", it also ignores plenty of longer words that are
considered generally meaningless, The hashtag idea is good, ill look into
that, consider it on my todo list :)

Click detection is something I have been thinking about, its not as hard as
you think as the general coordinates of each word are stored when building the
cloud in the first place.

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Veera
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?

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seanodonnell
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.

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follower
Nifty. It always bothered me that Wordle required Java.

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seanodonnell
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.

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ChrisArchitect
nicely done. always enjoyed playing with Wordle.

