Tag clouds are a pretty popular way of displaying and indexing data, but they’re not without their faults. I added a tag cloud to a helpdesk system I created and while it works well, it eventually suffered from a common tag cloud problem: one tag had been used much more frequently than the other and the resultant cloud had one big tag and a million tiny tags. The way to solve the problem is through weighting the data.

A popular way of weighting the data is to apply a logarithmic scale to the data. Google turns up a bunch of different ways to accomplish this, but I’m not satisfied by any of them. Most solutions rely on grouping the data into steps, and performing a …

For a couple years now, I’ve been dabbling in web-based database projects developed in PHP. After a while, I’d grown tired of PHP and in doing some work with Python scripts, I realized python just made a lot more sense to my brain than other languages—perl looks like a Martian language and ruby feels backwards to me.

So I set off looking at some of the offerings for web-development in python. One project that looked quite promising was django. (Having spent a large chunk of time playing jazz music, I couldn’t help but love a web-framework named after a jazz legend.) After running through a couple tutorials, I’d made up my mind.

This website is my first django project, and although I’ve …