Category Archives: features

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Wordie Image Search

There is now an ‘image search’ link under each word, which when clicked performs a Yahoo! image search and displays the results inline. On your profile you can set Wordie to do this automatically, obviating the need for the click.

Or if you prefer to kick it old school, you can turn it off entirely. Click on ‘you’, then ‘edit personal preferences’, and you’ll see radio buttons that let you set image search to automatic, on demand, or not there at all.

One of Wordie’s charms, I’m told, is the emphasis on text über alles, so I made this optional and tried to keep it subtle. But it’s worth playing with, even if you are a textist. Yahoo! image search can be almost WeirdNetian in what it comes up with for more abstract terms, and for quotidian words it’s an excellent image browser. Especially, if I may say, when married to Wordie.

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Better Sorting for Lists and Comments

A small update: lists and comments on words now have more and better sorting options. Comments, previously unsortable, can now be viewed oldest to most recent, or vice versa. Lists had previously been sortable alphabetically, or chronologically by order added. That’s still the case, but now both those sorts can also be reversed.

For both lists and word comments, your last choice is remembered on subsequent words and lists.

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Make a Wordie Screensaver

If you’d like random words to float around your screen when you’re not using your computer, it’s easy to set up Wordie’s recent words feed as a screensaver.

If you’re using a Mac, open System Preferences and in the “Desktop & Screen Saver” section select “Screen Saver,” then choose “RSS Visualizer” (this is the effect Apple stores usually have going at their “Genius” bars). Under “options” enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordieLatestWords. When the screen saver fires up, you’ll see the latest nonsense from Wordie floating dreamily across the screen.

If you’re using Windows, NewsGator offers a screensaver add-on for their feed reader, and Lifehacker has a post outlining a similar download.

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More Definitions

Wordie has displayed a definition for most words for the past few months, but it had been displaying only the most common one, in order to keep the focus on the fun stuff: citations and comments added by members.

You can now see all the definitions available for a word, in case you want to save a trip to a proper dictionary or just want to see what other strange tricks WeirdNet has up its sleeve. I tried to keep it subtle, so you still see only the top-ranked one, but now with a “more” link just below it. Click and the rest appear.

I decided to leave out example sentences, thinking it might get in the way of people providing their own, but I’m happy to revisit that if people would like. Let me know.

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Introducing Wordie Mini-Feeds

Wordie now has a Facebook-style mini-feed of your recent activity, like adding words or lists, making comments, moving words, and adding tags. If you go to a profile, you’ll see a link to this in the upper-right, available as either a web page or a feed.

By default this is turned on and visible to everyone. You can turn yours off by clicking the ‘edit personal preferences’ link on your profile. Activity is tracked (if you keep it turned on) from tonight forward; previous activity won’t be available.

This is a first step towards enabling some sort of watchlist feature, so you can more easily keep track of what friends and people whose words you like are up to–think Flickr contacts. Since it’s available as a feed, I’m hoping people will find their own good uses for it, as they’ve done with other Wordie feeds.

While I was mucking about on the server I also upgraded a bunch of other stuff (for the curious, I moved the whole shooting match to Rails 2.0), and probably broke something, or many things. As always, please let me know if I did, or if you have suggestions.

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Group Lists

Wordie now lets you create collaborative lists. Families, create a shared list for the Airing of Grievances! Friends, list your private slang. Classes, build vocabulary lists, or list and discuss words from a book you’re reading. Create a collaborative dictionary for your profession or a project. Lots of uses here.

To start, create or edit a list. You’ll see two new fields: a radio button which lets you choose whether it’s an individual or group list, and a field where you can invite others, by Wordie name or email. People you list will be sent an invitation to contribute (and join, if they weren’t already a member). Contributors see the same ‘add word’ box as the owner of the list, and the list shows who contributed what.

While I was messing with lists I took the opportunity to clean things up a bit. Everybody’s list of lists now has its own page, instead of appearing as a heap of illegible text, as had been the case.

As per usual, I’m sure I broke tons of shit when launching this, so let me know if anything is amiss, or if you have any suggestions.

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Transmogrified List Feeds

Lisa from Sophistechate has built a refurbished feed for Wordie lists using Yahoo! Pipes. It takes the feed from any list page, and adds the row of lookup favicons that appear under the words on the site to the words in the feed. Like so.

One thing to note is that once you’ve generated the pipe, you won’t immediately see the transmogrified feed on the Pipes page, which threw me at first. You first need to click the ‘My Yahoo,’ ‘Add to Google’, or, to see the raw feed, ‘More options’ link.

Thanks Lisa! This joins angharad and uselessness’s Wordie Bookmarklet as another very cool member-contributed utility.