Blog my Mind my Map

Then someone makes sometimes a really beautiful map. Look at the map from Agnessa:

all full map

Open the flash version and see how nice and balanced is. Now I wonder how could I get automatically a pic out of the flash images, and make it a thumbnail so people have an idea what a map looks like.

This evening I wrote some small changes in the make map page. Now there are only one form instead of two. The tags are shown first, then the space to write them, then the title. The idea is that once the tags have been chosen a person knows roughly what title should the map have. While putting it before was just ensuring having all the titles equal. I also made the default title empty, and added some javascript that requries the user to actually write something in the title field.

I hope that all those changes will

make it easier for people to map only some tags

clarify better how to make a map

make sure that the title is written.

Now when you upload some data it checks that the number of posts and the number of tags are more than 1. And it only stores it in that case. It is not so important for data that is empty, but to filter users that try to store data in the wrong format. If the format is wrong the system will not recognise neither posts nor data. Thus it is useless to store it. Also it stops people from posting wrong data and then have the expectation that I might be able to magically make a mindmap out of it.

Made some small, but I think important, changes. Now when a user uploads some data can specify where it is taken from. What service. In this way the mindmap points back to the original data. The data must then contain the name of the user. If the data is anonymous then it points to the page of the user that uploaded the data, and each tag in the mindmap points to the popular page for that tag.

What is interesting is that I also added a page with all the services that are covered. And in this page it is also possible to upload other services. In other words this system is open for as many different bookmarking services as there are. Wow!

I don’t have alot of time to work on this service, but by just using one or two hours a day, every evening I seem to make a small but costant progress. This is fun!

One of the most cool features of MMM is the ability to make custom mindmaps of only the tags you are interested in. How do you do it:

first you need to register.

(yeah, I know, it sucks. But I need to store the map next to your name, so that if you come back you can delete it. My internal sense of order gets upset without this.)

To test the system you don’t actually need to upload your own data. You can do it with any other data uploaded by anyone else. Just go on the main page, and when it sais:

Chris’ zoo from Pietro’s file data.xml
using tags: wildanimal taoism sustainability permaculture embodiment ecology activism activist animalaid animal animalrights animals animalexperimentation
by Pietro on the 4th of May 2007

click on data.xml

Yes, you can click above, from this page, but the point is to learn to do it from the front page. Clicking on Data.xml will send you to the data page of the data “Data”. That is, the data (type of page) of the data (what it contains) “Data” (name of the data).

There you will find a huge tag cloud. Click on the tags you are interested in.

Scroll down, add a nice title. Click Make Custom map.

Et voila’!

Hint: if you don’t add any tag you make a map with all the tags.

I added the flash view. Now it is possible to see maps both with the jave applet or with a Flash applet. It is much nicer, smoother, but it only works with smaller maps. The really big ones only open under java. I still need to add the icons.

Quite proud of myself, I have to say. I debugged the custom map. I still don’t know how big a map it can do before crashing, but before it was crashing if the user had some particular combinations of characters in its posts. Now that has been fixed. I have to say that the custom map is really at the time the best thing of the site. The possibility to choose the tags you are interested in and just map those makes it possible to take from a big file of bookmarks only a topic, and map that.

The result is really quite outstanding. Soon I shall start to add css. I also added  a map page, and a data page. This slows down a bit the users. Now to see the map  you need to click two times. On the other hand I plan to insert all sort of interesting information in those pages. For now when you open the page of some data you are given all the maps that has been done with those data, and all the tags for those maps. It is quite interesting, as in this way you can build a series of maps on a single data, that shws it from various POV.

The custom map are nearly there. They work sometime. What is a custom map? It is a mindmap made only for some specific tags. At the moment it is not possible anymore to see a mindmap of ALL the posts many of us have done. We have too many. But by choosing only the posts on a specific topic still very interesting mindmaps can be done. And since the data is free anybody can look at anybody else paper and grep it according to the topic they find most interesting. This is done by going to the Data Page and from there clicking on the tags thar you are interested in. Adding an interesting title, et voila’. Les Jeux sont fait. Except that from time to time it does not work.

First you need to register.

Then you need to log in, inserting your username and your password in the header.

Once you are logged in go to your personal page. You can find it by clicking on [my account], in the header.

Then you need to download your data from del.icio.us. And then save it in your computer.

Now you need to upload your data into Mind My Map. This can be done from your personal page. In the second form. The one that says: upload xml data. Attention: in this way you are releasing your data in the public domain. That is, if you care about it and consider your list of bookmarks a work of creativity.

Assuming you have uploaded your data, you now need to make the mindmap. Go to your personal page. Scroll down until you see a line that looks like:

(Data 36) [Download] [make standard mindmap] All uploaded by Pietro on 24 April 2007 [Forget] [Delete]

Of course the name of who uploaded it, the name of the data, the date, will all be different. :). Click on [make standard mindmap].

If all has gone well so far, if you now go to your personal page, there should be your map waiting for you. Click on [Show] to see it.

If you have any question, please ask it here. And yes, I will try to simplify the process.

It is still quite ugly, but it works. And the fact that something works is at this stage the only thing that I care off. I am speaking about the Data page. A page for each of the data, which also holds a tagcloud of all the tags in a particular xml file.

As a base I used Sujit’s code (which I wish to thank in this occasion). Which was ok, although I suspect that a real python programmer would have rewrote everything in half the lines, double the speed. But what really bothered me was how Sujit divided the tagcloud into different sizes. Because he does it in a linear way on the tag popularity. But following the tag a power law the result is quite steep. So I rewrote that part making every set aboout the same size. I am still not satisfied. I know the solution has some logs inside. But not for today. For now it is ok. See the result.

So, the good news is that I found the bug. The bad news is that it cannot be easily taken off. Essentially Dreamhost has installed an old version of MySQLdb, and buggy. This means that all the data once they get stored through python in mysql then are only stored as ascii code. And any non ascii character rises an error. So as a temporary patch I encoded everything as an ascii before sending it. And any unicode character just get replaced with a ? or similar. Amen. I hate it, but for now it is ok. I might try to install mysqldb in a separate version, but that’s in the future. For now a lot of maps which were before crashing are now not crashing anymore.