In a few short days, I’ll have been blogging for a year. To celebrate, I decided to try and come up with a way to visually represent my blog.

Enter Wordle.net.

Wordle is a little program that analyses text input and creates a “word cloud,” similar to how the the tag cloud feature of many blogs work. The larger the word, the greater it’s frequency in the text. The only difference between Wordle and most blog-style tag-clouds is well… it’s nicer looking, and Wordle is based only on word count, not tag count. So Worldle’s output is not based so much on subject matter than on language use. As you can see, I tend to not use very big words. 🙂

To get the text ready, I exported all of my blog using the standard tools available with a free WordPress account. I then cleared out all the XML crap using a variety of complex search and replace algorithms that would bore just about anyone except for the most masochistic of computer nerds. I then found out afterwards I could have just fed Wordle the RSS feed of my blog, but where’s the fun in that?

Anyways, I’ll have to try and do this every year around this time. It should be interesting to see how my writing style will change over time, and it’s a pretty cool way to represent data that would otherwise be rather boring.