Category Archives: features

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Wordie Mobile, New Feature Roundup

This weekend saw the arrival of Wordie Mobile, a version of the site optimized for phones and other small-screen devices. This makes it much easier to add a word to your lists if you’re at the library, or on the bus, or wherever: Just point your phone browser to http://wordie.org/m. Thanks to Crystalover at Twitter for inspiring this. Other new goodies launched in the last week or two:

  • Updated, more wordie-esque design for Errata. Obviously.
  • Paging for past comments. You can now scroll back through all 36,367 of them.
  • Ads on every page, every day! Ok, so that’s not exactly a feature, but, well, baby needs shoes.
  • You can now leave comments on tag pages, like so.
  • A new search page, which lets you search comments, lists, or, via the Gooble, everything at once.
  • More sort options for lists, and maybe some other little niceties like that; I’ve probably forgotten something.
There’s more good stuff on deck, though the pace of development may slow a bit as I focus on other projects. More on that soon.

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Paginated Word Lists

Finally, word lists have been broken into pages, to make it easier to go through long lists (and to prevent long lists from crashing browsers–Wordie now passes the stpeter test).

I cranked this out, so it’s pretty basic, and probably buggy. Right now each page is 100 words long; eventually I’ll make that configurable, and otherwise fancy it up. Let me know if you see any problems.

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Search Term Autocomplete

The search box now automatically fetches the first 10 words that match what you’ve entered, and updates the list as you type.

I’m finding this more useful than I expected it to be, personally. I’ve been using it as a sort of spell-checker. A whoopee-cushion, hand-buzzer sort of spell checker: it shows you how people have spelled things in Wordie, not how they’re actually spelled–and misspellings in Wordie are legion. But it’s interesting to see even the mistakes.

This suggests a slew of possible future features: actual spellcheck, improved search (comments search, in particular), integration with a proper dictionary. Things to looks forward to, someday.

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Make Your Own Boss Button

Yesterday I added a little featurette to Wordie: a keyboard shortcut (ctl-b) that automatically launches a work-appropriate site. The idea was to help people enjoy Wordie at work, without it being quite so obvious that they weren’t actually working. Silly, but whatever. I think it’s funny.

A few people have asked how to do the same, so here it is: how to implement a Wordie-style boss button.

First, download this open-source javascript library: http://www.openjs.com/scripts/events/keyboard_shortcuts/shortcut.js

Put it in the docroot of your webserver wherever you keep your javascript files (mine are in /javascripts), and add this function to the top of the file:

function bossButton() {
var rand = Math.floor(Math.random()*10);
switch(rand) {
case 0: url = ‘http://www.igra.com/’; break;
case 1: url = ‘http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/qtr207/q207tab1.html’; break;
case 2: url = ‘http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html’; break;
case 3: url = ‘http://affiliate.amalgamatedlife.com/hipaa-Privacy_notice-SPA.asp’; break;
case 4: url = ‘http://www.barrymaher.com/’; break;
case 5: url = ‘http://www.batonrougeyogacompany.com/corporate.htm’; break;
case 6: url = ‘http://www.amazon.com/Chicken-Whole-Giannone-Chilled-3-25/dp/B000H4YZM8/’; break;
case 7: url = ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver’; break;
case 8: url = ‘http://www.cachebeauty.com/wholsale/king.htm#jars’; break;
case 9: url = ‘http://www.thermo.com/com/cda/product/detail/0,1055,10121515,00.html’; break;
}
shortcut.add(“Ctrl+b”,function() {
location.href=url;
});
}

Then add this line to your web pages, inside the <head> tags at the top of the page, ideally in a commonly called template so you only have to do it once for the whole site. Make sure to edit the path so it matches where you actually put shortcuts.js:

<script src=”/javascripts/shortcuts.js” type=”text/javascript”></script></div>

Then, at the bottom of every page (again, ideally in a template), add this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>bossButton();</script>

Now you can hit ‘ctl-b’, and the page will automatically change to one of the 10 urls in the bossButton function. You can change the urls, of course. To use a different keyboard shortcut, change the text in the “shortcut.add(…)” line towards the bottom of the bossButton() function.

Have fun, and don’t work too hard 🙂

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Hit Ctl-b: The Boss Button

The Boss Button isn’t some really fine button. It’s an insurance policy that helps you maximize the amount of time you spend on Wordie, and minimize the consequences of getting nothing else done. Or at least it minimizes your chances of getting caught fecking off. There’ll probably still be consequences.

It works like this: You’re in your cubicle, half alseep, trying to come up with an amusing outfit for your vergerhade character, and you hear your boss trudging toward you. Casually hit ‘Ctl-b’ on your keyboard, and the browser window displaying Wordie will instantly go to one of a random assortment of work-appropriate* pages. For further verisimilitude, you can configure the Boss Button to go to a page suitable for your industry or workplace (click ‘edit personal preferences’ on your profile**).

Work is for suckers. Spend more time on Wordie.

* For the most part. Depends where you work. ymmv.
** I added hcard support to the profiles while I was mucking about. fwiw.

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Tagging Words

Wordie was originally conceived as a joke: all tags, no content*. Well, the punchline has finally arrived. This weekend I added tagging**.

Tagging is a way to categorize things by adding descriptive metadata to them in the form of, well… words. On Wordie this may seem like gilding the lily, but tagging has been repeatedly requested since the site launched, and for good reason. Among other things, tags allow:

  • Glossaries and topical dictionaries. Want to create a glossary of beer-related terms? Use tags: http://wordie.org/tags/beer

  • Collaborative lists. Want to get a bunch of your pirate friends together and create the ultimate list of pirate words? Have everyone add a ‘pirate’ tag to their piratish words, and bob’s your uncle: http://wordie.org/tags/pirate

  • Lists for an event or organization. Create lists specific to a class or conference by having participants use a custom tag like MIT6001 or DefCon15.
  • Related Words. Want to show all synonyms and antonyms of a word? Use tags.

Tagging is useful right off the bat. And once a critical mass of tags has been entered it gets more useful still, as it becomes possible to extract interesting information based on site-wide tagging patterns. For starters, at the bottom of each page there’s a link to a site-wide tag cloud, showing the last 500 tags entered. Like the comments page, it’s a good view into what’s current and another way to watch Wordie happen.

It’s also a good opportunity for me to pimp another site of mine, TagsAhoy.com, which lets you search your personal tags across variety of services. It now supports Wordie. Yes, I’m mildly obsessed with tagging.

Since this launched quietly a few days ago, over 1,000 tags have been added, and as the pace picks up and more viewing and sorting options become available it’ll only get more interesting***. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback as this was developed, and to everyone who has added or plans to add tags to their words. Fun for you, fun for the whole family.

* It’s a joke no longer; it’s now the best site on the Internet, ever.
** If you’ve been on del.icio.us since 2004, if you think tagging is passé, well, it’s as useful as ever, so shut up! I have yet to see a better ad-hoc organizational technique, and I still believe. Back to the future!
*** Check out Tim’s great blog post on when tags work and when they don’t. Since many of the benefits of tagging on Wordie accrue to the person doing it, I’m hoping we fall into the “when they do” column.

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Listphile

My pal Steve just launched Listphile.com, a site for making collaborative lists of all kinds. It’s beautiful, super easy to use, and worth checking out. It just launched, but already has an enjoyable assortment of user-contributed lists spanning the gamut from lighthearted fun (The Dude Abides, Yoda Quotes with Video) to more serious collective information gathering (Open Surf Atlas). Stop by and vote for Wordie on my list of Language-related sites.