Adding Links to Your Mind Map

Now typically a thumbnail image pulled from the website will be displayed, however since I am still looking for good images to display on my new site, it hasn't pulled one up. They seem to be using a plugin from Thumbshots.com, another awesome free tool that provides you with free thumbnail images for your site.

In addition to regular URL's you can also link directly to Wikipedia articles, an email address, or a totally separate mind map! This unlocks loads of potential uses for Mind42.com, from helping link you back to the wiki article where you got your inspiration to creating a colossal mind multi-map (combining mind maps).

Attaching Images to Your Mind Maps

The next really awesome feature is the ability to grab image URLs and display them within your mind map. I literally just google searched WA and pulled the link for the first image that appealed to me here:

Interestingly enough, the image is displayed in the image placeholder within the tiny little "New node" caption. So once you close the tab with the image link on the left you can't actually see the image itself. To resolve this, you can select the little gray Square symbol in the upper right hand corner of the Image Tab while it is open. This changes your display to look like so:

Beautiful! As you can see, you now have a beautiful, image with a title and link attached at the bottom.

Utilizing Icons to Spice Up Your Maps

Now I shall demonstrate the next feature, which are icons. In order to do so I will create a new node. I will call it the landing page and we'll put some symbols next to it to help it stick out a bit. I figure some money icons should do the trick:

After playing around with the icons for a bit I figured out that, while you can insert multiple icons into each node, you cannot enter the same icon more than once. This is a little bit of an annoying feature as the usage of the symbols is slightly less intuitive than the rest of the site, however they still accomplish their purposes.

Styling Your Mind Maps

Another item that bothered me at first and you may also have noticed is that the mind map attempts to keep everything balanced. As I create new nodes it automatically shifts items around. I shall kill two birds with one stone and demonstrate this as well as create a new node to demonstrate the Style options here:

The Style selection is a bit small. You can edit the text in each node with three options for sizing, italics, bold, underline, and a short list of colors to select. As near as I can make out, these only color the lines and not the text itself, however I typically leave my mind maps preferring not to color code things overly much.

Also, as I mentioned above, it has shifted the node with the image from the right side of the mind map, to the lower left hand side in an effort to keep things balanced. Users of Bubbl.us will find this slightly bothersome at first as the mind maps are fairly rigid in structure, however this really is only a minor concern primarily relating to user preference and once you are used to this balancing process you cease to notice it.

Node Management 101

You have now built and constructed a working mind map online. Click here to check out the sample mind map we have been working on up to now. You may reorganize the nodes by clicking and dragging them to different parts of the mind map, however, the site keeps the same overall structure for each mind map. It does allow you to hide or display smaller nodes, even having a button that hides all nodes just to the left of the zoom slider bar at the top. Now that you've got your mind map, how shall you use it? See the next page for a few ideas on how to use this powerful tool.