Resources for writers & researchers

Research tools

Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com/: An excellent guide to dozens of general-purpose and specialized Web search tools.
Google http://www.google.com/: The big dog of Internet search.
Google Help: Advanced Search http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html: Guide to Google's power search form.
Google Help: Search Features http://www.google.com/help/features.html: Special search features and operators on Google, including the terrific define keyword, currency conversions, stock quotes, local and site search, package tracking, weather, movies, VIN numbers, UPC codes, patent numbers, and phonebook including reverse phone number search.
Yahoo! fast-loading version http://search.yahoo.com/: A minimalist version of the Yahoo! search interface; great for dialup users.
Wikipedia (in English) http://en.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia: Free collaborative online encyclopedia with about 3 million articles (English). Wikipedia seems to be good for the more techno-geeky topics, which is most of what I use it for. Apparently it's sometimes pretty awful for arts and cultural stuff. When it matters, you should probably double-check with other sources.
How Stuff Works http://www.howstuffworks.com/: Including computer stuff, automotive stuff, electronics, science, health, money, travel. Anytime you want to ditch their default page-by-page interface for any article, just click on the "printable view" icon. Unfortunately Howstuffworks.com is not nearly as well speed-optimized as Wikipedia, and is pretty frustrating on dialup.
OneLook Dictionaries http://www.onelook.com/: This looks up your word in multiple Web dictionaries simultaneously, including Merriam Webster.
Merriam Webster Online http://www.merriam-webster.com/
yourDictionary.com http://www.yourdictionary.com/
Wordsmyth http://www.wordsmyth.net/
Hoover's http://www.hoovers.com/: Search a global database of 12 million companies.
ArtLex Art Dictionary http://www.artlex.com/
FreeTranslation.com http://www.freetranslation.com/: Free language translation online, and connections to inexpensive professional translation services.

Software

Adobe FrameMaker http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/ Wikipedia: The proprietary tool of choice for complex, book-length technical documentation. Very powerful and stable; paragraph and character format catalogs make it easy to standardize presentation of text elements.
Scribus http://www.scribus.net/ Wikipedia: Open-source freeware desktop publishing, cross-platform on Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, OS/2, and Windows. Scribus 1.0 was released in June 2003.
OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org/ Wikipedia: This open-source freeware office-suite alternative can open, edit, and save MS Office file formats; see my OpenOffice page for more details. Version 1.1.5 included Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, and Impress for presentations. OOo 2.0, released 20 Oct 2005, adds Math equation editor and Base user-friendly database manager, and complies with the new OpenDocument formats standard.
Adobe Dreamweaver & Contribute http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/ Wikipedia: Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG Web authorship tool, with all kinds of nifty features; Contribute lets non-developer page authors easily edit content without interfering with site structure or CSS formatting. Adobe acquired the original developers Macromedia in December 2005.
SeaMonkey Composer http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ Wikipedia: Another user-friendly tool for Web authorship, but free, which Dreamweaver most definitely is not; part of the open-source freeware Mozilla/Seamonkey browser suite. See my Web browsers page for more details on Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey.
BlueGriffon http://www.bluegriffon.org/: New open-source freeware WYSIWYG Web authorship tool, in the works since September 2008 from Nvu developer Daniel Glazman. Nvu was started from the Mozilla Composer code base in 2005, after the Mozilla Suite of which Composer was a part was deemphasized in favor of Firefox.
Notepad++ home page http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/ Wikipedia Notepad++ project page with RSS feeds http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/ Notepad++ plugins http://sourceforge.net/projects/npp-plugins/: If you like editing your HTML code directly, this open-source editor is worth a look: configurable syntax highlighting, multi-document and multi-view interface, bookmarks, search and replace, including in open documents and in files and with regular expressions support, and recognizes and highlights 20 other languages, including CSS, Javascript, PHP, PERL, and XML.
Notepad++ Portable http://portableapps.com/apps/development/notepadpp_portable: Notepad++ packaged as a portable app, so you can take it with you on a USB drive and use it on any computer.
Notepad2 http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html Wikipedia: Another Notepad-like editor with multi-language syntax highlighting: freeware but not open-source, single document interface like Windows Notepad.
RSS Readers http://blogspace.com/rss/readers: Really Simple Syndication is a new flexible system for Internet news feeds.
FeedReader home page http://www.feedreader.com/ FeedReader project page with RSS feeds http://sourceforge.net/projects/feedreader: Simple non-bloated open-source RSS aggregator, neither WinXP nor .NET required; version 2.90 4/05.
Word 2003 viewer*: Requires Windows 2000 SP4 or Windows XP. An example of not clear on the concept: a free viewer whose reason for existence is to provide semi-open access to MS Office documents, which is pretty well closed about what Windows versions it can be run on.

* There used to be a Microsoft Word 97/2000 viewer that ran on Windows 95, 98, and NT. KB article 165908, which used to point to it, now arrogantly states that it's been "replaced" by the Word 2003 viewer, which only runs on 2000/XP. Of course this matters less than it would have, now that we all have access to free OpenOffice.org, which can not only view documents in the Microsoft Office formats, but also edit, save, and create them. In fact OOo can open older Office formats that current versions of Office no longer support.

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Books

Powell's City of Books (Portland OR) http://www.powells.com/ Wikipedia: Powell's is one of the biggest bookstores for new and used books in the country; the main store occupies a full city block. They've had a separate technical books store that's about the size of your average Barnes & Noble; apparently there are plans to move that into the expanded main store. Online inventory search and ordering; on the Web since 1994. They actually pay cash for used books, at the store or online on their Website; most bookstores only do store credit, if that.
Amazon.com Books http://www.amazon.com/: "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" (Powell's was online earlier).
BarnesandNoble.com http://www.barnesandnoble.com/: "World's Largest Bookseller Online" (I find these conflicting claims very conflicting).
Strunk, William. 1918. The Elements of Style http://www.bartleby.com/141/: A (writing) style guide on the Web. If you do a lot of writing, you should probably have a print copy of this.
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation http://www.grammarbook.com/: Eighth edition published 2004.
Bartleby.com books online http://www.bartleby.com/
IPL: The Internet Public Library http://www.ipl.org/
The On-line Books Page http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

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Online maps

Wikipedia:
Comparison of
Web map services

Google Maps* http://maps.google.com/ Wikipedia: To/from driving directions; street map and satellite imagery.
Yahoo! Maps http://maps.yahoo.com/ Wikipedia: To/from driving directions, URL link syntax.
MapQuest (AOL) http://www.mapquest.com/ Wikipedia
Bing Maps (Microsoft) http://www.bing.com/maps/ Wikipedia: Formerly Microsoft Live Maps
Superpages.com maps (Verizon) http://yellowpages.superpages.com/supermaps/mapform.jsp?
Maps On Us (Switchboard.com) http://www.mapsonus.com/
Expedia maps (Microsoft) http://www.expedia.com/Map
American FactFinder including maps (US Census Bureau) http://factfinder.census.gov/ Tiger Mapping Service http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapbrowse-tbl: These Census Bureau map services are a little harder to use, but they're public domain.
CIA World Factbook https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/: Basic geographic, economic, cultural data on all the world's countries; try Liechtenstein.

CIA Factbook's two-letter country codes are sometimes not the same as the similar-looking Internet country codes.

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Miscellaneous

Because of the letters, Canadian postal codes are always stored correctly by spreadsheet programs as text, unlike American ZIP codes. It looks to me like the Canadian system was meant to be a rationalized version of British postal codes, which also use letters and numbers but may have developed more organically.

USPS ZIP code lookup: You can look up a ZIP code from an address, city from a ZIP code, or see all ZIP codes for a city.
Canadian postal code lookup: We Yanks tend to be sadly clueless about Canadian postal codes. They look like V5T 1Y9 (that's in Vancouver BC) always with the format: letter, number, letter, space, number, letter, number. Let's get it right.
BetterWhois.com http://www.betterwhois.com/
Network Solutions whois lookup http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/: You can usually find out who an Internet domain name belongs to and where. Both these sites search multiple domain registrar databases, but the BetterWhois page loads faster.
AmeriCom Area Decoder http://decoder.americom.com/: Enter an area code and get a list of cities; or enter a city and get the area code.
AT&T AnyWho http://www.anywho.com/: Toll-free directory search; find people and email addresses; reverse phone-number lookup.
Switchboard.com http://www.switchboard.com/
US Copyright Office http://www.copyright.gov/
Copyright FAQ http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/
US Patent & Trademark Office http://www.uspto.gov/: Search tools and info for US patents and trademarks.
Trademark FAQ http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp
Yahoo: Get Local http://local.yahoo.com/: Generate a page of local links from any zip code, or browse by state.
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Yahoo: People Search http://people.yahoo.com/: Search for a phone number or email address based on a name and/or city.

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