I've been thinking a lot about how people navigate websites.

Most sites force you down a path: click the menu, find a category, read a list. It's efficient, but it's also boring. It assumes you know what you're looking for.

What about when you don't?

The Discoverability Problem

When I first built Jottings, I focused on letting people write and publish quickly. But I realized I was missing something obvious: people want to explore what you've written without having to scroll through everything.

My early sites had a sidebar. A simple archive list. Click a month, see the posts. Functional, yes. But it told you nothing about what was actually interesting on the site.

What if, instead of a boring list, you could see at a glance which topics you care about most?

Enter the Tag Cloud

A tag cloud is deceptively simple: list your tags, but scale the text size based on how many posts use that tag.

Write 50 posts about "coffee"? That word gets huge. Write one post about "woodworking"? That word stays small.

No algorithms. No machine learning. No dark patterns. Just typography doing what it does best: creating visual hierarchy.

Why This Works

1. Instant Comprehension

A tag cloud tells you the story of a site in seconds. You don't need to read anything. Your eye naturally gravitates toward the larger words, and you understand what this person cares about.

I have a friend who's obsessed with cooking. Another who writes entirely about parenting. Another who can't stop thinking about technology. A good tag cloud for each of their sites would look completely different—and that's the point.

2. Exploration Without Direction

There's a particular pleasure in clicking a tag and discovering 20 posts you forgot you wrote. It's like finding an old journal and rediscovering your own thoughts.

Most search-driven discovery feels goal-oriented: "I want to find posts about X." But tag cloud discovery is curiosity-driven: "I wonder what happens if I click this word?"

3. SEO Without Trying

Here's the thing nobody talks about: tag clouds are fantastic for SEO.

Each tag becomes its own page with a URL like /tag/coffee.html. Search engines see these as separate pages covering different topics. Users can link to them. They naturally build internal linking structure.

You're not optimizing for Google. You're just being organized, and search engines reward that.

The Jottings Implementation

We built our tag cloud to be automatic and passive.

You don't have to do anything special. You tag your posts (or don't—tags are optional). The system aggregates them, counts occurrences, and generates a visual tag cloud page at /tags.html.

The math is straightforward:

• Find the minimum and maximum tag frequencies
• Scale each tag's size proportionally within that range
• Sort alphabetically for consistency
• Let CSS do the heavy lifting

No complex algorithms. No expensive database queries. Just pure, honest typography.

What This Means for Readers

Imagine visiting a site and seeing this:

coffee design WRITING technology productivity photography LIFE philosophy

You know immediately what this person writes about. "Writing" is huge (their passion), "coffee" is medium-sized (a frequent topic), "productivity" is there but smaller (occasional posts).

Now click "writing" and you see every essay they've published on the topic, paginated by date. Click "coffee" and suddenly you're discovering their entire food/lifestyle archive.

This is discovery without friction. No recommendation algorithm trying to guess what you want. No endless scroll training your attention span for the worse.

Just you, the writer's archive, and the freedom to explore.

The Serendipity Factor

There's something magical about stumbling onto an old post by accident.

Maybe you click a small tag expecting a few posts, and instead find a hidden gem you wrote six months ago. Maybe you discover a thread that connects multiple tags together. Maybe you realize you've written way more about something than you thought.

This kind of serendipity is rare on the modern web. We've optimized for efficiency at the cost of discovery. Tag clouds bring back a little bit of that wandering.

Building Your Own

If you're using Jottings, the tag cloud is already there. Just tag your posts naturally as you write. No SEO strategizing needed. No trying to game a system.

The cloud will grow organically as you publish. Tags you use frequently will naturally become prominent. Over time, it becomes a real-time visualization of what you care about.

And that's powerful. Not for marketing. Not for manipulation. But for simple, honest self-reflection.

What are you really writing about? The tag cloud shows you.

Tags aren't just organizational overhead. They're a window into the mind of a writer. If you're thinking about starting a site or moving to Jottings, consider how you'll organize and share your work. A tag cloud might be simpler than you think—and more valuable than you'd expect.

Want to build your own tag cloud? Get started with Jottings today.