I've admired bookmarklets from afar for quite a while now and am delighted to have obtained permission from Steve Kangas, the Grand Poobah of Bookmarklets, to draw upon the discoveries presented in his most excellent site, Bookmarklets.com. Many thanks, Steve. The Web needs more people with your openness toward information sharing!

Here's a nifty little bookmarklet to whet your appetite:

1. First, you must create the bookmarklet on your local browser. To do so, drag this link – Define – to your Personal toolbar (Netscape) or Link toolbar (IE). Or, right-click on the Define link and select Add Bookmark (Netscape) or Add to Favorites (IE) to add the bookmarklet to your Bookmarks/Favorites menu.

2. Now, suppose you ran into the word eldritch in an online article on ancient Halloween rituals and wanted to look up its definition. You could take the time and trouble to open a new browser window, navigate to an online dictionary site, and submit the word — struggling to remember the correct spelling (eldridge? eldrich?) — to the dictionary's search engine. Or, you could turn to your handy Define bookmarklet:

• Use your mouse to select (highlight) the word eldritch. (No leading/trailing spaces or punctuation marks, please!)

• Run your Define bookmarklet, by clicking on it in your Personal/Favorites toolbar or selecting it from your Bookmarks/Favorites menu.

• Et voilà: The definition of eldritch in all its hideous, ghastly glory!

Kewl, yes? And even kewler, you can easily create similar bookmarklets to submit selected words to search engines of your choice: Technical encyclopedias, all-purpose search engines (such as Yahoo! and AltaVista), thesauruses, repositories of current events, etc.

Wanna see more bookmarklets, find out how they work, and learn how to create them yourself? Read on, read on ...