The Visual Dictionary Blog

Happy Christmas

2007-12-25T11:02:00.000Z

Server Migration

2007-12-17T13:37:00.001Z

Take a deep breath - we're moving the server to a new home this week (mainly because the current server ran out of space!) Apologies if you cannot access the site or notice problems over the next 48 hours, but hopefully it will help improve performance. Drop me a line if you have any problems.

The Visual Dictionary Poetry

2007-09-28T09:34:00.001+01:00

We had a couple of friends around for dinner last night, and I broke out the box of moo cards. I then had to run to the shops to pick up some cheese, and by the time i got back, even with the limited amount of words in the pack, Emma had written a little poem with them. I'd never thought of that idea. I'm going to do a bunch of other moo packs with a better/wider selection of words, and some themed sets also.

moo

2007-09-26T22:27:00.001+01:00

Woo! Moo!
My moo cards for the visual dictionary arrived today. They're wicked, just wicked. Ask me for one when you see me next!

madinspain

2007-09-24T19:05:00.001+01:00

Fred was at MADINSPAIN this weekend, and showed the visual dictionary to the audience as part of his talk. Hello to anyone who is visiting the site from Spain, especially to those who heard about us from Fred. Its really hard to track word of mouth referrals, but just today, we had quite a few visits from Madrid, so you never know. I should have given him some moocards to hand out ;)

onomatopeia

2007-08-21T14:00:00.000+01:00

Such a great page - bonus points to anyone who can find these in the real non-batman world!

http://www.batmania.com.ar/paginas/serie_onomatopeyas.htm

Digital SLR User Magazine

2007-08-16T23:02:00.001+01:00

We were was featured in the August edition of Digital SLR User magazine, on the back page. A great feature, but they managed to mis-spell my name. Still, close enough - at least they got the URL right.

There were also a good few images from the dictionary posted in the article - thanks to everyone who offered their images for that. I'll scan the article this week some point

Dominos

2007-08-07T23:54:00.001+01:00

The domino effect of getting a high profile link never ceases to amaze me (despite me explaining it to my clients on a regular basis). Since Die Welt linked to us last week, a bunch of other great sites have also picked up on the site and started linking to us also. Interestingly enough, the earthlink newsletter which went out linking to TVD last month, whilst brought with it around 1000 visits in a day, did not have the same network effect. Perhaps Earthlink's consumers are less likely to be site owners.

We've also been featured on 52projects.com - which is a truly great site which i've admired and been inspired by for a good long time. Thanks to Jeffrey for that link. If you've not seen 52 projects before, take a look right now. They managed to find us via Ali Edwards, who has also been great in sending us a steady stream of traffic over the past year or so.

Also thanks to minorbug for explaining a little more about what the Die Welt article said. Thumbs up indeed!

Pending Images

2007-08-04T20:33:00.000+01:00

I've added a little new functionality this weekend - the ability for you to see your pending images. This has come about for a number of reasons:

1. Many people email me to ask when their images will be moderated, often when their images have already been rejected for various reasons. You can now see how many images you have waiting to be moderated.
2. Often images which are uploaded, didn't upload correctly, or failed. By checking your list of pending images, you can immediately see if the images uploaded okay. If they didn't, you can delete and try again.
3. In case you uploaded something you didn't want to, you can now remove it.

This will eventually also list images which have been rejected, along with the reason (the three most common reasons for rejecting an image are: too thin or narrow, the image is not of a word and file upload errors). Hopefully this will help!

To access your pending images, click Contribute, and once you've logged in, scroll down to see your link to pending images. Or, just click here: http://thevisualdictionary.net/user/images/pending

API Calls

2007-08-03T16:46:00.000+01:00

I've updated the API & Feeds page with two calls:

Images :: Get Recent
Images :: Get Alphabetically

Drop me a line if you start to play with these and see any issues.

Ein Foto-Wörterbuch zum schmökern

2007-08-03T11:19:00.000+01:00

Welt.de are linking to the visual dictionary today. Despite it saying that its a US site (? erm... where did you get that factoid from), it seems like a good review. Any offers to help me translate better than Google's attempt?

Original: Welt Online
English: Google Translate

In any case, Guten Tag to any German visitors from the site!

Spike in Traffic / New User Emails

2007-07-08T20:45:00.000+01:00

We had a nice spike of traffic this week, a good 3000 visitors on July 3 - not sure where the traffic came from though - the referring server says earthlink.net, and it seems like its coming from a webmail page. Are you one of these users? Let us know what drove you to the site!

Also, the spike led me to find out there was a problem with new users signing up - emails were not being sent out to provide you with your passwords - sorry about that. Send us an email at feedback [ at ] thevisualdictionary [ dot ] net, and we'll send you your new user email! Alternatively, you can just request a 'forgotten password' mail, and that will send you the welcome mail once again!

Update: After a bit of creative googling, it seems we were featured in the earthlink newsletter.

New Templating

2007-06-16T17:33:00.000+01:00

I've switched most (if not all) of the pages on the site this weekend to a new templating language. It shouldn't effect you in the slightest, but if you do see any bugs, please email us, and we'll sort it out. We've also fixed a couple of things which were outstanding.

You'll also notice a new nav item - API & Feeds. There's not much on there yet, but keep watching that space, and we'll be releasing more over the next few weeks.

We might also be moving the whole site to a new (more permanent) home, but again, that shouldn't make any difference to you, apart from hopefully speed and performance improvements!

yahoo picked!

2007-05-20T11:07:00.000+01:00

http://picks.yahoo.com/picks/i/20070423.html

Yahoo! were kind enough to link to us last month. I totally missed it - mostly because i'm rubbish at keeping up with the feedback i get on the site - apologies to anyone who has emailed me recently, i've tried to reply to everyone this morning!

Sharing your images via the API

2007-03-04T14:01:00.000Z

I've added the ability for users to opt out of the upcoming API feeds.

As we'll be providing people the ability to pull images directly from our database into their own applications and sites, I wanted to make sure that everyone was happy with their images being used. You can now login to the 'contribute' section, select 'Modify your account settings' and choose for your images not to be included in the APIs.

Your images will still appear on the site of course, but you're able to choose whether your images can be included in someone else's work when the APIs are released. Don't worry, you retain copyright and ownership of the images, regardless of what you choose.

By default, everyone has been set to share their images via the API. You should change this if you're not happy with the standard setting. We'll be emailing everyone soon to make sure you're aware of the new setting.

If you're interested in reading more about Creative Commons licensing, visit http://creativecommons.org/

Happy Birthday

2007-02-17T17:28:00.000Z

Well, the Visual Dictionary is one year old this month, so I thought it best to post and say Happy Birthday to the site, and thank everyone who has posted, and who is continuing to post. I'll admit, i've not been around much recently, and some of the posted images were backing up - sorry about that - all pending images have been reviewed now - and i'm making the process easier so it doesn't take me so long!

I've also got a couple of additions i want to make in the next few months, so stay posted!

VisualTwitter

2006-11-08T21:46:00.000Z

An example of what you can do with the Visual Dictionary APIs:

http://thevisualdictionary.net/twitter/

I've not really had a moment's time to sort out releasing these, but i promise i will be before the new year, hopefully with a screensaver. Keep in touch if you're interested in helping me develop that.

Typomania

2006-08-22T09:37:00.000+01:00

Interesting post on youtube and blog from the designer who created the font 'Meta'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loh7fw7Au04

http://www.spiekermann.com/

A few emails - our response

2006-08-13T15:52:00.000+01:00

Apologies to those of you who post anonymously to the blog, and i can't reply back to you directly. I'm going to answer a few comments emailed in this week here.

1. URL for the blog vs. blog images

cfthrifty wrote:
Is this obvious? One cannot use the concept of http://thevisualdictionary.net/WORD where WORD is the word you're looking for, if the word one is looking for is BLOG. Although, there is no entry currently for BLOG (the word), what will happen when an image of the word BLOG is added?

very subtle difference...
http://thevisualdictionary.net/blog/ will take you to the blog, but http://thevisualdicationary.net/blog (no trailing slash) will take you to the images of blog.
this will happen once the image is posted... (although i'll certainly add a link to the images of blog to the blog in case people mistype)

2. The dictionary isn't a dictionary
Yup, you're right, its not - it doesn't define words, its actual a collection of words, which I imagine would be called a lexography?

3. My image didn't appear/upload?
Sorry, if it was a technical issue, you probably saw error messages and code, and all wotnot. Try the upload again, and it should work. If your image uploaded, but you never see it in the dictionary, its more than likely that:

a) it had more than one word immediatly obvious in the image
or
b) the image aspect ratio was too small, ie. really thin/tall

Those are the most common reasons we deny inclusion.

Google Rankings

2006-07-23T20:21:00.000+01:00

Also noticed that we're at the top of Google's results for "The Visual Dictionary" (not too surprising), and only 2nd for "visual dictionary", which is great news.

3000 and still counting

2006-07-23T20:08:00.000+01:00

We've surpassed the 3000 image mark this month, and the dictionary is still steadily growing. Thanks again to everyone who is posting. There are some truly fantastic images being posted, quality and quantity.

I've made a little selection of images I've spotted this month - by no means a complete collection of the images which I'm really impressed with, but certainly a starting point to perhaps inspire you to contribute, or just browse around other author's images.

To move from visual to textual, you might also be interested in a monthly book review with a twist, over a webponce.com - Books in the Bog. We'd love to head your thoughts for a little light loo reading also.

Too big!

2006-06-24T10:16:00.000+01:00

Minorbug spotted a problem with the Word Cloud yesterday.

Apologies to anyone who's had problems viewing it, but there was a problem with the code i was using running out of memory as there were too many words (how brilliant is that!!?). I also noticed I was only showing the top 1000 words too - i've removed that restriction now, so the cloud is much fuller and an accurate representation of all of the words in the dictionary - blimey.

I've fixed it now, lets hope we get lots of more problems due to it being too popular though ;)

Editorial Selection

2006-06-18T16:40:00.000+01:00

I've added a little 'editorial' selection to the visual dictionary. It'll be growing over time, but I'll be using it to highlight some of the more interesting words and images on the dictionary.

This month I've succumbed to World Cup fever, and presented a little selection of relevant words. Enjoy!

Search functionality

2006-06-10T21:26:00.000+01:00

I've added a search box this weekend - mostly because i've seen several comments on blogs linking to the site saying how it would be great to be able to search for specific words. I'd never really thought about it, as I've always been aware of the ability to just type in

http://thevisualdictionary.net/WORD

where WORD is the word you're looking for - although i suppose its not that obvious if you're not looking at the URLs when browsing around.

Anyway - you'll now find there is a handy search box on the top right of every page. Try it out. If there is no exact match to the word you're looking for, it will make some suggestions of words which are spelt or sound similar.

Email me if there are any problems, as I've not tested it a huge amount.

A few hurdles

2006-05-09T12:37:00.000+01:00

We've past two key points this month:

+ Over 1% of all words in the OED are now in TVD!
+ Our first user with over 500 words

And lello and nh have been battling it out at the top spot for the past few weeks.
Its quite amusing ;)