Visit the demo page to see the animated tagcloud for your delicious.com ^[1] account.

You can view the source and if you want to insert the DeliSphere tagcloud in your site, you can download the delisphere distribution.

The Delesphere tagcloud is an adaptation of the famous WordPress ^[2] Cumulus plugin.

The WordPress Cumulus plugin

WP-Cumulus ^[3] is a WordPress plugin providing a Flash 3D animation displaying the tags related to the WordPress-powered blog. You can visit Roy Tanck's site at http://www.roytanck.com.

If you are using DotClear-powered blog, you can use the TagFlash ^[4] adaptation.

WP-Cumulus is a WordPress plugin, hence a PHP script that will request the MySql database for tags hosted by the blog. A click on a tag will then open up the posts related to the tag.

Delisphere architecture - Delicious API

DeliSphere Flash animation uses Delicious web services to get the tag cloud. Consider for example the bookmarks for delicious account : http://delicious.com/coutant.

Delicious provides an API ^[5]. But to use those web services you need to be authenticated with targeted delicous account.

When you are just reeding public data like bookmarks or tags, the smartest approach is to use the feeds ^[6] services. Choosing RSS ot Json format. Json is just fine, for example the tag feed for above account is http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/tags/coutant .

{ "flex":135, "blazeds":7, "dnd": 8, "jee5":23 ... }

Delisphere architecture - cross-domain policy

FlashPlayer cross domain policy will not enable a Flash application downloaded from domain A to be requesting services from an another domain B. Unless domain B is actually exposing a cross-domain friendly policy file.

Delicious.com is not exposing such a friendly policy file. But since V2, the feeds service does! Here is the file : http://feeds.delicious.com/crossdomain.xml .

<cross-domain-policy>
  <allow-access-from domain="*" />
</cross-domain-policy>

See post crossdomain.xml now on feeds.delicious.com ^[7]

That way the delisphere app can be downloaded from anywhere onto a brower and from that location be connecting to Delicious feeds web service.

Last step is the randomizing of spherical coordinates ^[8]