I’ve been working on a new project for the past several days and I’m finally ready to let some folks peek under the curtain. I think it will be extremely useful for many people. My wife even got excited when I showed her the prototype. Although my geek projects usually put her to sleep, she could relate to this one.

I’ve created an application that aggregates several online references: dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, etc. The website is designed specifically with the blogging community in mind. Blogging can be improved as we all work to improve our writing. I want this to become a portal for people who want to improve their writing skills. The address of my new site is http://www.postref.com. The application is called PostRef.

Additionally, I’m a blog reader, and I found myself constantly looking things up as I read people’s blogs. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to integrate the reference books with the blog posts so that I could look the word up and then come straight back to the post.” That’s exactly what PostRef does.

So, here it goes. I wrote a WordPress Plugin to kick things into gear. Links to PostRef will appear at the bottom of this post. I’m also going to show off the lookup/lookup tags that can be used for inline hyperlinks to PostRef. This is the definition of the word [lookup]erudite/Dictionary/Encarta Dictionary[/lookup] on the Encarta Dictionary.

Now to click the Publish button…

Technorati Tags: blogging, reference books, dictionary, PostRef