No lengthy screencasts today, just a quick and easy way to add an enhancement to your site that I believe users will appreciate.

I'm all about numbers, I don't know why.  I like to see how many posts a blogger has made to their site, how many comments have been made, etc.  It's a useful barometer (for me at least) so see if it's an active blog or not, i.e. if someone has made a bazillion posts but only has 5 comments, then something is obviously wrong.  If there are only 50 posts but it has a bazillion comments, more than like the owner has given up due to comment spam.  Etc.  Only the finest blogs make it to my aggregator, and the following is (a one of many) useful metric to gauge what's going on over at a particular blog.

In this evening's tidbit (which will be the first of a Tidbit mini-series to add this type of statistical information in various places on your site) we'll add a Topic Count counter to each tag in your tag cloud.

It's dead simple.  Any control that declares a <Blog:TagCloud> control (or any type of tagcloud, i.e.<CS:TagCloud>, <Galleries:TagCloud>, etc) exposes a ShowTagCounts property, which they inherit from the CommunityServer.Controls.BaseTagCloud control.

To enable the topic count, find any TagCloud control in your /skins/<skinThatContainsTagCloud> and find the TagCloud control declaration.  Add the following attribute: ShowTagCounts="true" before the closing wicket and topic counts will show up similar to the image on the left.  It's that easy.