Happy Christmas

Server Migration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.