er, well, how 'bout an easy way to look up the meaning of "life"? i've been working on a bookmarklet for dictionary.com word lookups (a bit on Friday, and a little more today), and have finally gotten the kinks worked out. since Microsoft refuses to do things according to established standards, i had a bugger of a time getting this thing to work in IE (had it up & running in Mozilla in about 5 minutes). but, it does work in both browsers now–and Netscape 4.75! oh, and if anyone is willing to test this on a Mac, please let me know how it works.

anyway, on to the thingy.

Lookup

to "install" this, just follow your normal routines for adding a link to your bookmarks/toolbar–either just drag it up there and drop it on your toolbar, or do the right-click "add bookmark" thing.

Now, the beauty of this beast is that you can (on a non-frames-based page–it won't work on bipolar…) use your mouse to select any word (or words) you like, click this bookmark, and voila!–a page pops up with the dictionary.com definition of the selected text.

enjoy!

*update*: of course, silly me did not think to check dictionary.com's site to see if they already had a bookmarklet, so, of course they do. but, on the bright side, mine is much more functional than theirs, so–nyah nyah!

plus, i've gone ahead and incorporated their little "enter a word to lookup" thing into mine, so now, if you don't select any text, you'll get a popup box asking you to input a word (this is great if you need to look up a word from a frames-based page). then, if you still don't enter a word (i.e. you hit "cancel") you won't be directed to the site at all… it'll be as if you never clicked the bookmark in the first place (except that you'll be a few seconds older). if anyone would rather have the option of still getting a dictionary.com window (even if you don't enter a word in the pop-up) let me know and i can fix it to do that as well.

if you grabbed the bookmark between 11:56 and 1:00 PM, be sure to grab it again, so you can enjoy the new functionality.

ok. i've now officially wasted enough time.