Flavorpill NYC

The brilliant Flavorpill e-zine has linked to The Visual Dictionary in their NYC edition this week.



If you're not already a subscriber to Flavorpill, and live in NYC, SF, LA, or back home in London, its a fantastic weekly email magaizine covering arts, literature, music and generally cool and interesting events in the city. Sign up here.

Enough of the sales pitch though, this is quite a watershed moment - seeing the dictionary in a site or destination which i already subscribe to (fairynuff, i sub. to the london version, but still ;) and didn't email/persuade/beg them to include it.. happy matthew ;)

More sites link to us

Well, the weekend has generated not a great deal of content, but a little interest around the site itself. We have links from Germany, Canada, Belgium, Czech Republic, and I've sent a few emails to the bigger design sites, like Pixelsurgeon, etc.

Here's a selection of those unprompted links:

Uppercase



DiscreetCenter.com



and...
animatlantique.net
Isolate.cz

Thanks for the links, and I'll keep you posted on how signups and contributions are going.

Non Self Promotion

Well, its nice when someone takes a lead from your blatant self promotion, and does a little for you

The Visual Dictionary at DLounge - The Digital Design Diary

It looks like a German design blog, and has some really nice sites linked from it.
Check out:

http://www.theyhatemydesign.net/main.html
http://www.mateogarcia.com/

Also, over at del.icio.us, currently four people linking to us

Blatant Self Promotion

Well, we've got to get it out there somehow I guess.

I posted the URL on newstoday this evening.
This is a sure fire way of getting plenty of bugs to come out of the woodwork (and the odd few random posts i'd wager too), but the first attempt at getting some posts from people who I don't know, and seeing if the idea is going to take off.

Fingers crossed.

Upload guidelines

(Until i've had a chance to post this on the site properly, this will live here)

Content

The simple rule is "one word".

Your image should contain a single word, or if more than one word is visible, it should clearly be obvious which is the word you're posting.

Our reference is the Oxford English dictionary, in fact, the one I have on my bookcase at home. If it does not appear in the dictionary, it is unlikely to be accepted.

We also may not accept words if they additionally contain unsuitable content (whilst swear words may be accepted, they may be 'rated' for later viewing preferences).

For proper nouns and brand names, currently, we're not accepting them if they don't appear in the dictionary. If a brand name appears in the dictionary under another meaning, it may be accepted.

Our word is final, if for some reason we don't feel the image should be included in the dictionary, we're happy to discuss it, but at the end of the day, if we say no, you should accept our final decision.


Technical
We'd love to support more image formats, but currently whilst we're in beta, we're accepting JPEG images (med-high quality please) between 640x480 and 1024x768. Images are automatically scaled to 640x480, so if you're manually scaling them anyway, thats the size to aim for.

Upload via HTTP is always shakey at best. Try and keep your images below 1Mb

Ideally, we like 4:3 ratio images, but we know sometimes they'll be cropped, and it doesn't always turn out like that, so we're flexible on that.

Privacy Policy

(Until i've had a chance to post this on the site properly, it will live here)

We hate spam, which is why we've designed this privacy policy around that.

The Visual Dictionary is a completely independant website, and the data we hold about you is yours. This means, you can request to see it at any time, request for it to be removed at any time, and we will never pass it on to a third party. At times, we may send you the occasional email, but you will be able to request that are you removed from these mailings, following instructions in the mail.

[email] An update from The Visual Dictionary

user

First of all, let me say thanks for the support you've already shown towards The Visual Dictionary.

We've already surpassed both the 100 image and 100 word mark, and as of today, the site has been officially launched - now accessible at http://thevisualdictionary.net

This is only a soft launch, we're still trying to drum up interest and get people posting, whilst more development of the functionality is taking place, but it would be great if you could start helping out by sending the link on to your friends, as well as continuing to post images.

We'll be keeping you posted on developments very occasionally over email, so if you want more up-to-date information, check out the TVD Blog, and just to let you know, we'll soon be releasing support for user profiles, comments and ratings, as well as cross linking of words.

Thanks again!

Matthew

domxsl and my new server

well, it looks like domxml xslt functions are pants.

i know i know, its all built into php5 now, and wotnot, but sablotron just seems to work better - and thats that. As a result, i'm getting impatient and moved the nameservers today to point 'thevisualdictionary.net' directly to the development servers. it means that the site will be soft launching some point this weekend (woot!).

it also means that i had to hurry up and sort out the validation, spam filtering and generally just sort things out. watch this space on monday, and you'll probably be able to start sending the dictionary on to your friends.

> 100 words

whoa - i missed a milestone by a few today.
we passed the 100 word mark, currently sitting at 103 lovely english beauties.
i suppose the next milestone is 100 users, but i'm happy with the 9 we've got currently, even though number 8 managed to find some problems with the upload process.
i simply need to add some validation to uploads (and perhaps a whizzy ajax style fuel gauge to show upload progress or something), and then migrate to the new server, and launch properly.

of course, the new server... doesn't support sablotron.
i shall be investigating the wonders of domxsl in due course.

100 today!

woo! 100th image posted today!



Thats certainly the first benchmark.
Next up, 100 words.