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Thoughts on a Rainy Day Thoughts on a Rainy Day

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Submitted by . on 2006-10-10 15:18.
A few thoughts that came up while helping with the Mellon Report. They might not even make it to the Feature Request state, but I thought I'd share them anyway.

To give you an idea of my state of mind as I was working today, let me say this: I don't know a thing about art history. On a good day, I might be able to identify which famous artist painted a certain painting; on an extremely good day, I might be able to name the work. However, these days are few and far between. The study of art history is even more of a marvel to me; when I went to college, I was terrified of the notecards the architecture students would make for those classes.

So as I started to read the Mellon Report, I felt completely lost, coming upon a few ideas, terms, even just plain words that I didn't know. I spent a bit of time skimming entries on wikipedia or just looking up an interestingly unknown word on Merrium-Webster.

And I thought to myself, it'd be nice to be able to look things like that up from the side-bar. Sure, it's easy enough to just open up a new tab and figure it out from there. However, I wanted to throw the idea of a search box to an online dictionary or even wikipedia on the sidebar. Just a random idea on a rainy (well, not anymore!) day.

Re: Thoughts on a Rainy Day

Posted by maxwell at 2006-10-10 21:02
We already did this a long time ago. Don't you have the roadmap installed? It's got a link to m-w.com on it.

On a more serious note, do you envision this as something like Firefox's upper-right-hand search box in order to allow searching for terms in different sites? I can't say that I'm a big fan of this idea, simply because it adds another search engine to potentially distract from our own. I wonder if this could be done as a Firefox extension instead, to make it more voluntary than hard-coded.

Re: Thoughts on a Rainy Day

Posted by reedstrm at 2006-10-11 16:02
A firefox extension that does something like that:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1171/
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