New sidebar tool—Map My Word

I came across this really nifty little gadget completely by accident in my Googling. It's called MapMyWord and it's a very handy little dictionary/thesaurus that graphically maps out a word, its definition(s) and closely related words plus their definitions too.

They let you add it to your custom Google home page (if you have one set up, which I do). They also allow you to design your own custom-sized version with certain available options regarding the look, then generate the HTML code so you can plug the tool into your own web pages. That's what I did here. You'll find it over to the right just below the "About Me" section and above the "Miscellaneous Links." I had to widen the sidebar area by 60 pixels to make it fit better. I could force it to fit in the smaller area, but the resulting word graph usually was wide enough to necessitate a horizontal scroll bar for the tool and I prefer it to have only a vertical scroll bar (in most cases) if I can help it.

It wasn't until after I put the tool in place, however, that I was poking about some more and found something a little odd. On the home page for vocab grapher they have (now "had," past tense—see the updates) a fairly standard menu on the left with a link to "TestiNoMials." Here's a screen shot...



At first I thought it might be a tongue-in-cheek gag which would be revealed somehow by clicking the link, but I see no indication there that they are aware of the misspelling. I sent them an email pointing out the irony just in case they aren't already aware of it.

The issue doesn't really bother me personally. We all make mistakes and as mistakes go that one's really not a big deal and is easily fixed. I still like the tool and will leave it in my sidebar, but as a company I assume they'd want to be aware of such an issue given the product in question.

UPDATE 1: It's only a few hours later and I see that the vocab grapher "TestiNoMials" link has already been changed to "TestiMoNials." It's nice to see a quick response. However, it's not quite fixed yet. Turns out that hovering your mouse pointer over one of the menu links changes it so that the letters spread out with spaces between and then it still reads "TestiNoMials." So I just sent another email. They're absolutely gonna hate me, but if the situation were reversed I'd want to know. So I assume that at some point there will be a second update.

UPDATE 2: Even quicker change that time! Didn't even log off and the change showed up already. Now when hovering over it, the link reads "Testimonials." Of course, it's possible that I just happened to catch things after they'd fixed the non-hover link, but before they fixed the hover version. I assumed, though, that the fix should be very easy, so if they were gonna fix one they'd fix'em both at the same time so long as they realized.

Like I said, we all make mistakes and really this one was trivial. If it hadn't been for the fact that the MapMyWord tool is a dictionary/thesaurus—and therefore spelling is crucial—I wouldn't have even bothered noting it at all. I only hope I didn't get anyone in too much trouble.

UPDATE 3: I just want to point out that "the VocabGrapher people" tried to reply to me via email, but it got bounced back to them as undeliverable for some reason (maybe my ISP's spam filters are a little too stringent). So apparently they then went to the trouble of setting up a basic blogspot profile just so they could leave a comment here. (I didn't realize that comments by non-blogger/blogspot users were not allowed, but I just now changed my blog option to allow anyone to comment. If I start getting spam I'll just switch it back, but with the word verification system in place that shouldn't be an issue.) Anyway, I thought that was very kind of them to do that just to let me know that they appreciated my bringing this (now humorous) issue to their attention. They're nice people, so please give their MapMyWord tool a try.