Cmaps as web pages

Here are links for downloading Cmap tools, online documentation, and some short video tutorials:
Cmap Tools download page
Cmap Tools online help
Using Cmap Tools – making maps
Using Cmap Tools – adding links
earlier post on Cmaps

Here is an example of a map I made of Vannevar Bush’s seminal article, As We May Think. It’s not so much a summary as a map of thoughts about the article, but you can see some of what you can do with it. If you click on the image, it opens up the map as a web page with active links. It links back to the original article, and out to further information. The links above the map could help you figure out how to use the tool, but it’s pretty easy to just poke around the menus and see what’s what.

There are a few things you need to do to get the map online. After it’s made and saved, go to File->Export Cmap As->Web Page… This will generate an HTML file, a JPG and a GIF in whatever directory you tell it to use. You’ll need all of those. Here’s a video of the process:

Once you have your files, you’ll want to put them online. I did this by going into cPanel and using File Manager. The file needs to be in the public_html folder. I made a new folder inside of that called cmap, just to keep things organized. I went inside the cmap folder and uploaded the three files that Cmap Tools made – the HTML, the JPG and the GIF. I had named my map “As We May Think,” which in hindsight was a bad idea because I don’t know how it would handle the spaces in the file name. To fix that, I used the Rename function to take the spaces out. Then I opened a new browser tab to check if it worked. The URL for the map is my domain (raptnrent.me) slash the folder I put it in (cmap) slash the file name (AsWeMayThink.html), or raptnrent.me/cmap/AsWeMayThink.html. If I had put it directly in the public_html folder, the URL wouldn’t have the /cmap part. Now that I think of it, using those capital letters was a bad idea too, because it is case-sensitive. So, no spaces and no caps in your file names. It just makes life easier that way. Here’s a video clip showing what I did: