End of Your Weekly Tutor – The dawn of a new era

Posted by Faizel Mohidin on Jul 31, 2010 in Mind Mapping, News | 0 comments

This is the last of Your Weekly Tutor articles as you’ve come to know it.

If you are sad because you’ve been looking forward to getting a weekly tip into you email inbox, don’t worry, something else and hopefully something better will replace it.

I started the ‘your weekly tutor’ to serve two purposes. Firstly, to create content for my new blogging website, MindMapTutor.com and secondly, to get a mailing list of followers that could serve as a yardstick to measure my degree of success, or failure.

I am now happy that I have achieved both objectives. MindMapTutor.com is a well established Mind Mapping authority on the Internet. My list of followers have also grown satisfactorily.

But there was a problem with the Blog format. I wasn’t happy with the way the content was organised for you, the reader. I wanted you to be able to get maximum benefit from the content.

Blogs are organised chronologically by default. This means that it’s mainly the new articles that get focus. The older ones just drop of the map.

If you are interested in a particular branch of Mind Mapping, it is very difficult to follow related articles on MindMapTutor.com.

With this in Mind, I started UsingMindMaps.com. By starting a ‘normal’ website, I could organise the content in a structure that was more ‘reader friendly’. I’ve been running both in parallel for a few months now, but the duplication of effort has become too great to sustain.

To make things easier, I’ve decided to provide the following touchpoints:

1. Set up of a new UsingMindMaps Facebook page.

The UsingMindMaps Facebook page will allow a community of people that are using, or want to use Mind Maps in their daily lives, to grow. I want it to become a community of ordinary people doing extraordinary things with Mind Maps.

The community allows two way communication, where you can not only give input on how you are using Mind Maps, but also connect with fellow Mind Mappers. In this way, we can all learn from each other’s experiences.

I hope to attract both newbies and expert Mind Mappers, as we can learn the most by being in touch with fellow Mind Mappers.

The Facebook page will also enable me to get your input and give you insight on our latest projects.

I foresee an exciting and vibrant community that is willing to share and collaborate with each other to make a difference.

So, join us on Facebook now. The page is still young, so get in now and be one of the people that helps take the community forward.

2. MindMapTutor Blog

MindMapTutor.com will be run more as a Blog and News site than before. I will update the blog as and when I find useful information to blog about.

I have not been a traditional blogger until now, as my articles were ‘real’ articles. This means that they were researched, drafted and redrafted before being published.

The blog will be more off the cuff opinions and news about Using Mind Maps and progress updates of our MindMapTutor developments.

I hope that this will therefore be more personal. It will also allow you to comment on updates and give input into the type of material that you would like.

If you don’t do anything, you will still get blog updates to your inbox, but it will not be the same as the ones you get at the moment.

The updates may be more regular, but also more erratic. So, if you don’t want this, feel free to unsubscribe and you will immediately be removed  from the list.

I don’t want be accused of sending you junk mail. It is not my policy to spam you with marketing information, as regular readers know.

3. UsingMindMaps.com

This will be the content resource centre.

It already needs a bit of revamping to get the content categorised better. I will continuously try to ensure that the content is organised in a way that is easily accessible and gives you maximum benefit.

I also publish a monthly newsletter on UsingMindMaps.com. So if you want to still get the good quality content that you’ve become used to in your Email inbox, subscribe now to our monthly newsletter.

The monthly newsletter will highlight the articles of the previous month, as you may miss them on the sight because the website is not organised chronologically.

The newsletter will also highlight what’s coming and have some news on the latest projects and activities.

You will also be given the latest tips and techniques on using Mind Maps when you subscribe to our newsletter.

To encourage you to sign up, we are offering some valuable freebies. So sign up today to get maximum value from UsingMindMaps.com.

I hope these changes will make your Mind Mapping experience a good one and that you will be able to start reaping all the benefits that Mind Mapping can give you.

MindMapTutor is Green

Posted by Faizel Mohidin on Dec 6, 2009 in Featured, News | 4 comments

How Green are you?

This article deviates slightly from my normal articles, but it is an important message that impacts all our lives.

I don’t see myself as an activist. I never was and I never will be. But I do believe that I do my best to make a difference within my own limitations.

Take MindMapTutor.com, or this very article, for example. It is done in the spirit of giving what I know to help as many people as possible. It is my version of ‘giving back’ what I have received in more abundance than many. I believing in giving more than I get back. In this case it is giving back to the environment.

I do charge for some services, though. So no good Samaritan labels!

A Short overview of global warming

We have all heard about the effects of Global warming and those that watched Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, started making this a moral issue. Once again, I leave that path to the activists.

Carbon dioxide and other gases naturally trap solar heat to warm the surface of our planet. This is a natural phenomenon and is required to keep our planet habitable. By burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil and clearing forests at an alarming rate, we have drastically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. The amount of carbon dioxide you produce is termed your ‘carbon footprint’.

This has caused ‘global warming’. Temperatures are starting to rise. This is causing glaciers to melt, animals to leave their natural habitats and the number of droughts and floods to increase.

We can solve this problem. Some would say that we have a moral obligation to do so. This article is about how I saw an opportunity to make a difference and took the decision to do so. Even small differences to your daily life can add up to make a big difference.

MindMaptutor’s beginnings

A few years ago, I was looking for a hosting company for my new website, MindMapTutor.com. I obviously wanted something that wasn’t too expensive, but I also wanted to provide excellent service. “Uptime” and speed are very important to visitors of any sight. I simply did not trust any of the free hosting companies. (A good thing, as I heard recently that GeoCities, the free hosting services provided by Yahoo! has ended their service to website owners.)

I also had to fund my own hosting, so it definitely had to be value for money.

When evaluating various hosts, there was one factor that swung it Hostgator’s way. They were an affordable Green hosting company. But that wasn’t all. They also provided unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and 99.9% guaranteed uptime. They met all the criteria I required.

Now, in case you don’t know what a Green company is, it is a company that cares for the environment and its carbon footprint.

The IT Data Centre’s use of energy

It is a fact that IT Data Centres consume 3%-4% of all electricity with its obvious associated emissions. It uses electricity to not only power the servers, but also to cool the servers.

The energy requirements of cooling servers are not very well known. For every watt that is needed to power a server, one to two watts are needed to cool it. You need at least twice as much renewable energy if you want to power and cool your servers with renewable energy.

When I read that Hostgator is 130% green certified, I wondered, ‘What does this mean?”

Renewable Energy Credits (RECs)

RECs allow you to offset your power usage against renewable energy resources by purchasing credits in a renewable source. If the renewable source puts this energy into the grid and you take energy out of the grid, (even if you are not in the same region as the renewable source), your net effect can be one of creating renewable energy versus consuming traditional energy. You could therefore have a positive net effect in reducing global warming.

Hostgator has bought renewable energy credits (RECs), by paying a Texas windfarm to generate energy on its behalf. This power is put into the grid. When Hostgator uses this power from the grid, it offsets it against the credits purchased.

In this way you can benefit by contributing to the use of renewable energy resources, even if your power comes from the general grid.

MindMapTutor’s approach

Now let’s take MindMapTutor as an example. On my own, I don’t have the resources to fund a wind farm, or power my hosting servers directly using renewable energy. But, by hosting with a company that is Green certified, my host servers are giving back more than they are taking out.

In this way MindMapTutor.com can be seen as a ‘Green’ website and contributing to saving the planet.

You can also minimise your impact on the environment. A quick start can be found at CarbonTracker.com, which lists 11 ways in which you can easily make a difference.

While this is a very short article, it was a very difficult one to write. Global warming and environmental issues are not my area of expertise. I just wanted to make sure that you are aware of the problem and show that sometimes a little forethought can make a huge difference.