Celebrating one year of blogging with a word cloud

This month marks the one year anniversary of Design Data Decisions! To celebrate, I decided to do a ‘visual display’ of this blog by creating a word cloud out of articles posted thus far. Using R.

This task turned out to be very easy, because of a cool word cloud generator function that I found in http://www.sthda.com/english/wiki/word-cloud-generator-in-r-one-killer-function-to-do-everything-you-need. So I just needed to install the required R packages ("tm", "SnowballC", "wordcloud", "RColorBrewer", "RCurl", "XML")and then call the word cloud generator function rquery.wordcloud(), supplying the blog URL as an argument, and my task was done:

source('http://www.sthda.com/upload/rquery_wordcloud.r')
url <- "https://designdatadecisions.wordpress.com"
res <- rquery.wordcloud(x=url, type="url", min.freq = 8, max.words = 200, 
        excludeWords=c("using","used","use","can","also"), colorPalette="Dark2") 
## exclude common words and restrict to words with frequency >= 8, just to get a better picture

with the resulting word cloud:

‘data’ is there, but I probably need to focus on ‘design’ and ‘decisions’ in my upcoming posts. Well, that in itself is a ‘decision’ 🙂