Archive for the ‘General’ Category

I’m a little late reporting on these news, as I currently have to deal with my Civilian service in Austria. But here it is, better late than never.

There is a new way on Factolex to organize your own lexica. As you know, you can categorize your lexicon using tags in very useful ways: Just click on a tag in the tagcloud to filter your lexicon just to display these terms.

Now you can specify a title and a comment for tags that carry a special meaning for you thus creating their own (sub)lexicon.

Using the “Add lexicon” link on the top right of your lexicon, you can oranize your tags and also define tags to be their own lexicon. As you can see on the screenshot, we have also added a way to see how many terms and facts you have, also if you have lexica in multiple languages (as I do).

Completing the updates, we have also revamped the start page a little to display a broader selection of what Factolex has to offer.

Coincidentally not only one, but 2 WordPress plugins were released today.

First, we have an official WordPress Plugin: Factolex Glossary

The plugin allows you to quickly add a glossary to your post or page, using facts from Factolex. Using it is very simple:

1. First, you write your post (or open up an already written post),
2. then you click the button “Check for terms”.
3. We then look in the Factolex database and offer you to choose which of the terms you want to include in your glossary.
4. So finally, you click the respective terms and select the meaning to be used. The term is then displayed in the sidebar box

By default a definition includes the term and its top fact. If you want to customize this, you can enter your Factolex username in the plugin settings

Download the Factolex Glossary plugin at the WordPress.org Plugin Repository. We have also set up a page that includes larger screenshots.

Also watch a screen cast here:

I have attached a glossary to this post, see below.

Secondly, Sebastian Moser (who also wrote the Factolex Greasemonkey Script) has been using his Factolex WordPress Plugin for quite a while on his blog already:

Today he has published it in the WordPress.org Plugin Repository. Check it out: Factolex WordPress plugin.

There is an open source alternative to Google Maps, called OpenStreetMap where everyone can help updating the map data. The project has gone a long way and already provides pretty solid data. It makes sense to give control to the users over the data. Everyone knows his neighborhood better than some place in another country. And third parties who provide data for Google Maps just don’t live in everyone’s neighborhood.

So it’s like OpenStreetMap is a perfect fit to Factolex. But the interface of Google Maps is pretty much unrivaled in my opinion. So we simply decided to combine the best of both worlds, as it is described in an article in the OpenStreetMap Wiki.

Take the not-so-well known small city of Cham in Germany, and let’s compare Google Maps to OpenStreetMap:

vs.

The procedure looks like this:

1. Go to http://twitter.com/factolex and follow the user factolex. This is so that we can reply to you via direct message.
2. Send a term by sending a Twitter message like @factolex Term
3. As quickly as possible, you will receive a direct message as reply.

During the process we will follow your Twitter user, so that from the first message on, you can ask Factolex via direct message as well: d factolex Term

In your user settings you can claim a Twitter user to your account, and also change a few settings:

You can configure Factolex in a way so that all terms that your search through Twitter will be saved to your lexicon, so that you can find it later when you’re back to your computer.

Give it a try! We use it internally a lot, in many situations this is the quickest way to ask Factolex for an explanation.

For low bandwidth situations, when you want to query Factolex as quickly as possible, we have created a new way to query it. Just enter this address:

i.factolex.com

This will pull up a page that instantly gives you the ability to enter a term:

Click on “OK” and the respective Factolex page will load.

New feature at Factolex: In the sidebar of each term, there now is a new checkbox:

It allows you to quickly add a term to your lexicon without having to check multiple facts.

Even more important, I think, is the function that the checkbox lets you actually hide a term from your lexicon. If you want to vote on certain facts but actually want to refrain from putting it in your lexicon, simply uncheck the box.

Your votes will still be there, but it won’t show up in your lexicon.

Just quickly wanted to announce that last night the one million-th (1,000,000!) fact has been posted on Factolex.

You can follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/factolex. We automatically post important milestones there.

Actually it’s a bit wrong to call him a new user. Factobot is rather a computer program that I have written. It helps out with defining terms at Factolex.

We all know that we have this great Encyclopedia on the web: Wikipedia. It would be foolish trying to create an entire new lexicon ignoring its existence. That’s why I have created Factobot.

So there you go, try and search for anything on Factolex. Should we not already have the term defined, Factobot will go ahead and fill in some basic facts.

short and concise explanations

Still we encourage you add facts that are not yet covered. Factobot is far from being capable of grasping all important facts about a term, so we still need your help!

After all, I hope it Factobot enables you to find some information on any term right away.

A new feature at Factolex: I have created a page that shows ongoing votings.

A voting takes place when someone has suggested a change to an existing term or fact. This is actually just meant to be for correcting small typos and for facts that have changed by itself (e.g. when a new mayor for a city was elected).

Also terms need to be found under multiple titles, which we call Aliases. For example people should also be able to find New York City when searching for NYC.

So, here is the page for Ongoing Votings.

Today I have re-established the ability to select text from a Wikipedia article when just adding facts to an existing term.

This feature was originally integrated when I created the feature for the Add Term page but then due to refactoring reasons (basically I moved the newly entered facts on the term page onto the sidebar) I had to remove it from the “Add a Fact” section at each term.

Probably you already know how, but still I have attached a picture on how adding facts through Wikipedia works:

Over time I plan to bring more external sources to your fingertip when adding terms or fact. I am open for suggestions on this!