MetalSmith-WordCloud

A metalsmith plugin that creates an array of weighted values for use in a word cloud.

This plugin needs to be used in conjunction with metalsmith-tags as the path for the cloud category can used to point to the html page listing of related articles. The metalsmith-tags plugin takes the string list of categories/tags and converts them to an array of values. The metalsmith-cloud plugin is dependent on this array that exists in each file object.

Cloud tags are sorted alphanumerically by tag name.

Installation

$ npm install metalsmith-cloud --save-dev

CLI Usage

Install the node modules and then add the metalsmith-tags key to your metalsmith.json plugins. The simplest use case just requires tag handle you want to use:

{
  "plugins": {
    "metalsmith-cloud": {
      "handle": "tags",
      "path": "topics",
      "reverse": true
    }
  }
}

Javascript Usage

Pass the plugin to Metalsmith#use:

var tags = require('metalsmith-tags'),
wordcloud = require('metalsmith-cloud');

metalsmith
    .use(tags({
        handle: 'tags',
        path: 'topics',
        template: '/partials/tag.hbt'
    }))
    .use(wordcloud({
        category: 'tags', //optional, default is tags
        reverse: false, //optional sort value on category, default is false
        path: '/topics' // <- Notice that path is prefixed with slash for absolute path 
    }))

Usage

Under The Covers

A property key 'cloud' is added to the metadata containing a sorted array of objects with 'ctg', 'wght' and 'pth' keys.

    {cloud: 
    [ { ctg: 'aws', wght: 1, pth: '/topics/aws' },
     { ctg: 'bash', wght: 1, pth: '/topics/bash' },
     { ctg: 'blog', wght: 2, pth: '/topics/blog' } ] }

Application

Using handlebars the following example creates links for each category.

{{#each cloud}}
    <a href="{{this.pth}}">
        {{this.ctg}}({{this.wght}})
    </a>
{{/each}}

where the html built would be as follows:

    <a href="/topics/aws">aws(1)</a>
    <a href="/topics/bash">bash(1)</a>
    <a href="/topics/blog">blog(1)</a>

There are several implementations for creating word clouds. http://ericstiles.github.io uses jquery.tagcloud.js to create a wordcloud on the site.