True to Words Cloud

Ever since "Gender Stereotyping & Word Clouds: A Random Post," I've wanted to create my own word cloud based on the text here at True to Words. I finally took the time to do it!

Though the Wordle site looks easy to use, these images took a bit longer than I expected. The instructions on the site said I could just input the address and it would figure out the rest. It only seemed to track the language of the first pages of my blog and I wanted to make a cloud that represented the words throughout the entirety of the blog. That meant I had to go the alternate route and copy/paste all of the text, including deleting anything that might have copied over that I didn't want to have counted, like all the dates, the part where it names me as the author of the post, even the social media bar that has the Twitter and Facebook buttons. All of these could have swayed my results.

Here is the first one I liked enough to save. It is vaguely the shape of Minnesota! Hey, I said vaguely. Click on the image to see a larger version on the Wordle site.

That image has all the "common" English words filtered out, but the website's idea of common and mine were vastly different, resulting in some words that didn't seem appropriate (such as "one" and so many different variations of the similar wards). So I made another word cloud using the "Advanced" option, inputting word count information the website had tabulated for me under the "Word Count" menu option. This way, I was also able to include more of the words that I feel more closely represent what this blog is about. By extension, it also is a pretty good representation of some of the things that I like or value in general.

Again, click on the image to see a larger version. All in all, Wordle was a pretty fun toy. I may consider trying to find another way to use it in the future.

Have you used Wordle before? Provide a link to your creation in the comments section!