Thanks to far too much time on my hands, I have now hand-coded a tag cloud for this blog: Knowledge Jolt with Jack Tag Cloud.
I started with Learning Movable Type's How to Make a Subject Index for Your Movable Type Blog. From there, I jumped to to Al-Muhajabah for the essential tag cloud code. And then I also found Kent Bye's Echo Chamber Project Tag Cloud Font Distribution Algorithm to be helpful. Then it was just a matter of beating my head on the table enough times to make it work (and look) right.
The twist for me was that I also wanted to use my existing categories within the tag cloud, because I have only begun adding tags to my posts since the beginning of the year. At this point, most of the large items in the cloud are related to categories, but I suspect that will change over time. I also intend to go back through my archives and add tags to the entries.
The page lists tags in frequency order, then in alphabetical order. I separated out only-used-once tags and list those alphabetically as well. When you click on a tag you are given a search results page that lists the matching entries. And in the right column, you are given a list of all the other tags and categories that I used in the listing. When you click on an entry that is a category, you are taken to the category archive. As of now, the category archive does not have the associated tags.