Getting an account
Go to Mind42.com and click on the "Sign in / Sign up" button to the right of the navigation bar.
Fill-in the "Sign up" form to the right. Don't forget to tick the box that says "I have read the terms of use, and I accept them". Also, if you don't want to receive regular emails from Mind42.com, uncheck the box that says "Subscribe to the Mind42 newsletter".
Click "Sign up" to submit the form and when you see a message saying that a confirmation e-mail has been sent to you, close the current page, open you email application, wait a few seconds for the message to arrive, and when it does, open it and click on the confirmation link.
A new tab in your browser will open with the "Sign in / Sign up" forms. This time you'll have to sign in, so fill-in the one to the left with the username and password you used in the sign up process.
On the dialog box that shows up, choose "New mind map" and you are ready to start creating your first one.
Tips on using Mind.42
By default, Mind42.com saves your mind maps automatically every 5 minutes. You may want to change this to, say, 3 minutes, by accessing the "Settings" dialog box (second icon to the right in the top bar).
Mind42.com map elements are called "nodes". And you cannot outline them as in a "normal" mind map. Be careful, as this shortcoming might invite you to write long sentences instead of just key-concepts..
Another small weakness of Mind42.com is that, due to the absence of node outlining, it is difficult to build "linking texts" between the key-concepts when necessary. To overcome this flaw, you may change the colour of the "linking nodes" to something dimmer than your regular colour (black by default). Make sure to uncheck the "Pass on style" box if you don't want every child node to inherit the new colour.
You can create two types of nodes whenever a node is focused (except for the main central one): child nodes and sibling nodes. You can do this more comfortably with your keyboard: use the "Tab" key for a child node and the "Shift + Tab" combination for a sibling node. You can also delete the focused node by hitting the "Del" key on your keyboard.
If you want to create a hidden note with extended information on any node, don't use the paper-clip icon and "create a note" route. Choose text editor instead (big icon to the top of the right side).
Mind42.com also offers a great integration with Wikipedia, Delicious and Google Images if you want to find links or images related to any of your nodes. Adding some images to your nodes will help to highlight your message better, but don't overuse the links, especially to the Wikipedia articles; everybody knows how to find them.
Mind42.com is great organising the spatial distribution of your nodes. But sometimes it messes things up after you drag nodes from one place to another. You can try to fix this by opening the "Settings" dialog box and clicking on the "Reset" button.
Letting others collaborate on your mind map
Just click on any of the two "Manage collaborators" icons in the top bar and enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the map with. Normally, you'll do this to allow others to edit your mind map, so keep the "Allow users to edit the map?" box ticked.
Your invitees will receive an email with a link to your mind map. They'll need to sign up for an account first if the don't have one.
Mind42.com offers a nifty way to communicate with your collaborators when you are working at the same time in the same mind map. You'll need an Skype account (you have Skype installed on your computer, don't you?) and entering your Skype username in the "Settings" dialog box.
Letting others view your mind map
Click on the "Publish Mindmap" icon in the top bar (the third one to the left).
Tick the box that says "Publish the map".
The first of the three text areas that show up contains the public address of your mind map. If all you want to do is letting someone else to view your mind map in his/her browser, just copy this link and send it to your friends or teacher by email. But if you need to write it on a piece of paper, you'd better shorten the address with, for instance, bit.ly.
Repeat the process above every time you want to guess the public address of your mind map.
Use the text in the second or third boxes to paste it in the HTML code of any web page of yours and link to or embed the mind map on it.
