Archive for November, 2007

I always loved tags but now it really became apparent how useful they are. Especially in a knowledge environment like Factolex. Let’s say you wanted to display a list of:

• Cities like San Francisco, London, …
• Companies like Apple, Coca-Cola, …
• TV Series like Family Guy, Prison Break, …
• Bloggers like Michael Arrington, Om Malik, …
• Quotes by people like Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, …
• Nationalities from people like Eminem, Mark Twain, …
• …

The possibilities are endless!

While Alex is programming the really tricky bits I just committed my first lines of PHP to enhance the knowledge experience. Next to working on design and XHTML/CSS I have to say it’s pretty relaxing to actually code something.

Factolex proudly presents another way of exploring the knowledge through … drum roll … the tagcloud.

Check it out at http://www.factolex.com/tagcloud/

You can choose to view the tags sorted by name…

or by size, ie. popularity

Alex, who currently lives in Vienna, Austria is reporting the first snow and low temperatures. He built a snowman on his window sill and took a picture.

Snowman
creating a snowman dates back to at least the Middle Ages

Enjoy winter time and our special coming in December!

Late at night we reached over 200 terms and 1000 facts! :)

A couple of new terms we find interesting, have been posted by Ewald. He studies Linguistics at the University of Vienna he told us.

Just like a real lexicon or any other serious book, Factolex now has its own index of terms. This is useful when you don’t know exactly how a word is spelled or if you just want to browse around.

Check it out at http://www.factolex.com/index/

Helpful Hint
You can also type http://www.factolex.com/index/Ge to get a list of words starting with “Ge”

Thanks to the great help from Chrissy and Matteo, we have reached our first milestone: over 100 terms and 600 facts. In the mean time Alex is fine-tuning the scripts and adding a couple of improvements to the way terms are added. It is now even easier to use and faster. I love JavaScript! :)

Want to see how terms, facts and tags evolved over time?
Click the link in the footer called Stats

Fresh out of the factolex kitchen: your personalized lexicon.

By selecting facts of terms you find relevant, factolex automatically creates your personal lexicon. This is very useful when you are doing research on a topic or just want to have a list of terms you read up on most.

Access your lexicon by clicking on the link in the header area:

Other people’s lexicon
You can also view lexica compiled by other people, for example nader’s lexicon

How it looks like

Alex finished a cool new feature: the integration of google maps on term pages with the tag “city”. This is very useful when you don’t know where a city is located. Where London is should be clear to everybody I guess :-)

How it looks like on the term page for London

The integration works automatically. You just need to click “Add a fact”, insert coordinates and the tag “coordinates”. Done.

How to enter coordinates

A friend of mine was telling me about procrastination the other day so I researched on the topic and found this hilarious video shown below.

Procrastination
type of avoidance behaviour characterised by postponing actions to a later time

Update:
Procrastination Flowchart

© http://projectsidewalk.com/flowchart/