Create a Cool Text Cloud with Wordle

I’ve been looking for something that is a bit more creative to potentially add some spark to some of my blog entries. I came across a pretty cool site, Wordle: Beautiful Word Clouds, which not only provides the creative element I’ve been in search of, but also gives me a way to see some of the most prominent words I use. You can either copy and paste a group of text or submit a URL. From there, you can customize the word cloud to your liking.

You can follow the steps below to create and customize your very own word cloud. Trust me, it’s extremely fun and it’s free.

1. Go to the Wordle Home Page, then Click on “Create your own”

2. The window below will popup. From here, you have the option of copying a group of text, providing a URL, or entering in you Delicious username.

3. For this example, I’ll type in my Eazy Cheezy URL, http://eazycheezy.blogspot.com/.

4. Once you paste your text, enter your URL or Delicious username, hit “Go” next to the option you chose.

5. Your word cloud will then be generated. Below is how my word cloud looks upon me hitting the Go button.
6. One of the great things about Wordle is that you can fully customize it. You can change the font, layout and color to your liking.

For the example below, I selected “layout” then “make all words lower-case”
Next I clicked “font” and “sexsmith”
Then I clicked on “color” and rather than choosing some of their different palettes, I chose “edit color palette” to customize it to my liking.

As you’ll see below, once you select “edit color palette,” you have the option to add additional colors and can change both the background and foreground colors by simply clicking on each color and picking your color of choice. For my example, I kept a white background and changed each color.
7. Once you’re finished customizing and you like the layout, you choose “Save to Gallery.”

8. When you choose “Save to Gallery,” you have the option of entering the title, username or anonymous and notes. For my example, I titled mine Eazy Cheezy and put my blog URL in the notes section.

9. After you enter your information in and Save, scroll down to find your html code.

10. Copy and paste the html code on your blog sidebar, in individual entries, etc. You can also view yours and other Worldle creations by clicking on their Gallery tab.

So, here is what my blog Wordle looks like. As you can see, I apparently use the word Widget and Music quite often.

NOTE: I noticed when I put the code in my individual blog entries, that I have to go back once and edit for it to appear. However, it does appear as an image within your edit mode, so you can expand it, move it, etc.