The tag cloud (or word cloud) is a visual representation of the word content of a given text: in plain English it’s a listing of the words having different sizes, those used more frequently being larger and those less used being smaller. It started out as a buzzword but quickly become largely used. I will not go now into endless discussions about the controversial value it adds to your websites. Assuming you already decided you want one, let’s see a very simple method to store the tags into a MySQL table.
First we need to create the table. I named it “tags” and it only has two fields: one to store the word and one to store the number of times it was found in the given text.
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `tags` ( `tag` text NOT NULL, `count` int(4) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', UNIQUE KEY `tag` (`tag`(20)) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; |
Please note I added an UNIQUE index key to the ‘tag’ filed to make sure the same word doesn’t get inserted twice. Now we can do the insert in a single query:
INSERT INTO tags SET tag = "new_word", count =1 ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE count = count +1 |
The first time it will insert the word, the rest it will increase the counter.
Simple as I promised.
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