For all of those of you wondering about the particulars of the lolrus anatomy, good news. I scanned this from an ancient biology textbook earlier today.

Now can we stop? Thanks.

…but I had to show you this picture of my cat. He is not very smart, but he is cute.

Sometimes, late at night, I wake up suddenly and wonder if there are any alpacas nearby. I can’t be the only one to suffer from this affliction, so I got right to work. After working with some highly respected scientists, I was able to create the Alpaca Finder, which can be used to locate alpacas by zip code.

Things you should know: Alpacas live forever, they are from the moon and can usually speak more than one language. They are also masters of space and time and can effortlessly trancend dimensions. This is why you will want to know where some are right now.  That is why I made you the Alpaca Finder.  Please enjoy and report any physical sightings you may have.

Here is a picture of my dog Zeke. Yes, he is cute, but the important thing is that I took this picture, uploaded it to my blog and wrote this post from my phone while standing on the beach. Now if only I could use this thing for something productive…

I’ve written a plugin for the Smarty Template engine that creates a tag cloud, similar to the ones you’d see on technorati or flickr.  The docs are here and you can download the plugin here.

Here’s a tag cloud plugin for Smarty.

Download it here:

tag_cloud.zip

Here’s how it works:

1. Place the ‘function.tag_cloud.php’ file included in the distribution in your smarty plugins directory.
2. In your php script, do something like this:

   $tags['horse'] = 22;
   $tags['cow'] = 12;
   $tags['chicken'] = 30;
   $tags['goat'] = 23;
   $smarty->assign(’TagArray’,$tag);
   $smarty->display(’tag-cloud.tpl’);

3. Then in your template (’tag-cloud.tpl’ , in this case.) simply use the {tag_cloud} tag, like so:

   {tag_cloud tags=$TagArray base_url='search.php?q='}

The script will take the following parameters:

• tags (required) - the tags and the totals for each tag - associative array
• base_url (required) - the base url to which the tag will be appended - string
• min_font_size (optional) - minimum font size (default 12) - integer
• max_font_size (optional) - maximum font size (default 30) - integer
• id (optional) - css id (default ‘tag_cloud’) - string
• class (optional) - css class (default ‘tag_cloud’) - string

I got the basic code for this from this really great tutorial over at scriptplayground.

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