Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
Searching Flickr for images licensed under Creative Commons is painfully slow and frustrating. For every new query you have to visit the advanced search page and select the appropriate check boxes before hitting the search button. I've been using Flickr in this way quite a bit lately and so I wanted to find an easier way to achieve this task.
I turned to Google and found this Greasemonkey hack. It looks good and does what I want, however I don't use Greasemonkey and I'm not about to start using it anytime soon. So I ended up creating a quick bookmarklet to do the job instead — I don't know why I didn't do this in the first place, it only took seconds?!
Flickr CC Search
You can install the bookmarklet by dragging it your Firefox "Bookmarks" toolbar.
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
As well as liking monkeys I also like dict.org. I've been using it more-and-more since my rant last month about pop-up advertising and Dictionary.com.
For anyone unfamiliar with dict.org, it's basically a free service without any adverts that provides a fast dictionary and thesaurus lookup [it does more too!]
The bookmarklets
This morning I decided to play about with creating a Bookmarklet to help perform dict.org queries. I ended up creating three. One to perform a standard query, another to perform dictionary only queries, and the final one to perform thesaurus only queries. The bookmarklets are below:
dict.org lookup — for performing default queries [dictionary + thesaurus + more]
dictionary lookup — for erm… …dictionary only queries
thesaurus lookup — for… …work it out :)
All three bookmarklets work the same way. You can either highlight a word on the web page you are viewing before clicking the bookmarklet to perform the query; or click the bookmarklet and type a word at the prompt.
Howto install the bookmarkets
Simply left-click and drag any of the bookmarklets to your Bookmarks Toolbar within Firefox.
Before installing the bookmarklets it should be noted that I've only tested them with Firefox — as an Ubuntu user it's pretty much the only browser I use. Please let me know [post a comment or something] if you test them with any other browsers.
Credits
These bookmarklets are a direct hack of the free browser buttons available for Dictionary.com. These were inspired by the work of Steve Kangas at Bookmarklets.com.