Mind-mapping in a fun way

Thanks to the NaNoWriMo-forum I have found a fantastic new site for mind-mapping. Not that I was looking for one, mind you. But so it goes.

And what was meant as a way of procrastination and delaying the inevitable (like writing my daily 2000 words) has instead helped me tremendously in actually finally getting a grip on where my story is going and organizing all those stray thoughts that were bumping around in my head into something resembling a plot.

Now, I don’t have much hope that this stuff I am writing will ever get to see the light of day in any form or shape, but I am convinced that bubbl.us is a site that will stay in my toolbox from now on.

I have never before had so much fun doing a mind-map. On paper they always tend to get too confusing for me after a while, because lots of things bunch up in one corner, whereas other parts are largely empty. Or I put so many lines through and around stuff that I can’t follow them anymore. All in all, paper mind-maps are just a huge waste of time for me.

So I didn’t really expect much from this online form of mind-mapping either, apart from killing a little time by playing around with these cute little bubbles. But, boy, was I wrong! Ok, it really is fun playing around with the bubbles, but it also actually works. Right from the start, without any lengthy explanations or anything. The use of the site is completely intuitive, I was up and going withing 2 minutes, even though there are lots of things you can do with it.

Not only can you easily make more bubbles, delete them (they very satisfyingly explode), move them around, delete the connections between them or connect them to others instead. Move the whole thing altogether just by clicking and dragging with your mouse. Zoom in or out just by scrolling. You can change the colors of the bubbles, hide the sidebar, export your finished mind-map as a picture or embed it in your website, you can save them, share them with friends, work on them together. And before you know it you have the whole outline for a complete project worked out.

Here is a complete overview of the current features, fittingly in the form of a mind-map.

It really is a fun and easy way to organize things and brainstorm creative solutions nagging pesky problems. (Like: where do I put the damn rats that keep wanting a bit part in my story? The answer to that would be chapter 6, but never mind.)

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I’m not sure, if this will be a recurring feature on this blog, but I couldn’t think of a better title right now, so whatever.

When I was organizing my bookmarks today I stumbled over the link to the website of Joe Vaux. He is an american graphic artist - according to his MySpace profile doing mainly animation, but what he displays on his own website are his paintings.

His art is definitely a bit on the disturbing side, but I like that. Also, there is always a lot going on in his pictures, so even if you look at them for quite a while you are still discovering new interesting details.

You really should go to his website to check out his pictures in a bigger version than I show here. This website, by the way, is one of the more inventive Flash-sites I have seen recently. I especially love the sound effects. And the pig, of course. But that’s just me, because I have a thing for pigs in general.

As usual I’m a little too late, and I don’t even know why I’m doing it in the first place, but today I spontaneously decided to color my blog pink for October this year. Even though I hate pink usually, but since it’s for a good cause I think I can bear it for a couple of weeks.

At least I put in a picture of Batman to keep it from going too all-out girly. Don’t think it helped a lot, though. I know it’s not the bestest and most beautiful theme, but it was the easiest to pinkify from the ones I already had on my computer.

If you’re reading the blog in a feed reader, come over to take a look and tell me what you think. Or laugh at me - whatever comes more naturally to you.

There was a bit of confusion about them, so I thought I’d better post a little explanation about this new feature here:

Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 I have enabled gravatars in the comments, which means that beside every comment you write here, your designated gravatar picture will appear.

If, that is, you have an account on Gravatar.com and have specified a picture there.

Gravatar stands for globally recognized avatar. It is simply an avatar image (much like in forums) that can follow you from weblog to weblog, if the site has gravatar support enabled. And since that option is now included in the standard WordPress software for version 2.5 and up, I think we will see these little images pop up on more and more blogs in the future.

You can even set up a different gravatar for different email addresses you use, so that you can have different pictures showing up beside your comments in different blogs. For myself I am currently using a picture of River Tam from the movie Serenity: (So, no, this is not what I look like, unfortunately.)

If you don’t have an account on gravatar.com yet (why not?), my server can obviously not show a specific picture for your comments. Which is a pity, I know. Instead, it would usually show a default picture, namely this one:

I think we all agree that this looks pretty boring. Well, even if you don’t agree, I still think it’s boring, which is why I changed it to this one:

This, just in case you live in a cave or something, is a picture of Wentworth Miller from Prison Break. There’s no special reason behind me using this particular icon, besides the fact that I think he looks cute and I liked the thought of having his picture appear on my blog almost every day.

But if, for whatever reason, you don’t like your comments to be associated with his picture (or any other one I might choose for that purpose in the future) there is an easy way out: you can just sign up on gravatar.com and specify your own picture there. It’s free, it’s easy, it doesn’t take more than 2 minutes and I think it’s fun.

And, no, this is not a sponsored post.

I usually don’t join such internet-wide things anymore, but I thought for this one I could make an exception. So, happy RSS Awareness Day everybody!

And if you have no idea what RSS is, follow the link or watch this cool video:

At least I hope so. Since renaming the first 9 pictures didn’t help I fiddled around some more, but embarrassingly it took me quite a while to get the idea to check the actual loadability of the single files. And what do you know, that turned out to be the whole problem. I just had to re-upload some of the pictures, because they apparently got damaged somehow during the FTP transfer and couldn’t be accessed anymore. Now everything should work as it is supposed to.
And no, even though I am a bit slow sometimes, I didn’t really take the whole day to figure this out. I actually spent most of the day outdoors, because it was one of those rare perfect spring days.

The ones among you who still actually visit my site and not read the blog in an RSS reader will have noticed it already: I have changed my theme again.

The theme is called Amazing Grace and it was made available by a guy named Vladimir Prelovac. And since I got really bored with Misty Look in the last couple of months, I am very glad I stumbled upon this new one. I have spent the last week customizing it on my testblog and I hope everything I fiddled around with is still working.

As you might have noticed there are rotating images in the header (48 different ones, to be precise). That is, most of the time they are there. Sometimes the graphics do not load on the first try and I have no idea why that happens or how I can stop it from happening. But I will keep trying to figure it out.

Anyway, apart from that little hitch I am very happy with this theme. I will go on tweaking some little things here and there (for instance the way smilies are displayed and the little category icons on the frontpage), but they will hardly be visible.

So what do you think? Do you like it?

Oh, and I also upgraded to WordPress 2.5., which went smoothly again - thank heavens. But the new dashboard still takes some gettin’ used to. But the good thing is, I’ve got a lot of nifty new plugins that make everything a little more sparkly. At least behind the scenes. LOL