Publish a word cloud and make mom proud.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's 2009 State of the City address.

Part I: Make the cloud

1. Collect your data, in this example, the text of Mayor Villaraigosa’s most recent State of the City address.
2. Copy the text you want to visualize to you clipboard.
3. Visit Wordle.net and click the “Create” link at the top.
4. Paste in the text and click “Go.”
5. You should now have a beautiful word cloud you can fiddle around with.
6. If something went wrong, consult Wordle’s troubleshooting guide.

Part II: Jack the cloud

1. Center your browser window so that the entire cloud is on the screen.
2. Take a snapshot of your current window. If you’re using Windows, it’s usually as easy as tapping the “Print Screen” button. If you’re on a different system, or your keyboard doesn’t have the button, check out the guide here.
3. Open up Microsoft Paint or Photoshop or whatever you use to edit images. Since “Print Screen” saves the image to your clipboard, like anything else you might cut or copy, all you have to do is paste the image into a new file.
4. Use the cropping tools to cut down the image so it only contains the cloud
5. Save out the result in either PNG or GIF file format.

Part III: Blog the cloud

1. Login to your WordPress or whatever CMS you use.
2. Upload your image to your site. If you’re using WordPress, they have a step-by-step guide here.
3. Insert the hosted image’s URL into an img tag in the HTML. If you’re using WordPress, it will do all that for you.

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