Hot
Recent beats historic.
Surfaces what the site is about now. A tag used forty times in 2019 stops outranking one used eight times this month.
A tag cloud weighted purely by count is a history of the site rather than a description of it. On any blog older than three years it stops being useful.
Adding a decay factor fixes it. Older uses still count, but less, so the cloud describes what the site is currently about while keeping its long-running subjects visible.
Our cloud finally reflects what we write about.
— A blog editor
Weighting that reflects the present.
Decay weighting
Older uses count for less on a configurable half-life, so the cloud describes the present.
Rising markers
Tags gaining ground faster than the site average are marked, which surfaces new subjects early.
Bounded sizing
A size floor and ceiling, so a dominant tag cannot make everything else unreadable.
Exclusion list
Structural tags that exist for internal use can be kept out of the cloud entirely.
The rest of the weighting.
Controls for a cloud that has to stay useful on a site with ten years of archive behind it.
- Configurable decay half-life
- Rising-tag markers
- Size floor and ceiling
- Exclusion list for internal tags
- Minimum use threshold
- Alphabetical or weighted ordering
- Recalculated only when terms change
- Template tag and widget-free helper
The details
- Version
- 2.2.0
- Released
- Nov 12, 2025
- Weighting
- Count and recency
- Half-life
- Configurable
- Size range
- Bounded
- Cache
- Cleared on publish
Recent releases
- 2.2.0Nov 2025 — Half-life made configurable rather than fixed at a year
- 2.1.0Sep 2025 — Rising markers added for fast-growing tags
- 2.0.0Aug 2025 — Size ceiling introduced to keep small tags legible
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