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Wed, 19 Oct 2005

Lightweight Visual Thesaurus

Update: I decided to give the Lightweight Visual Thesaurus its own website and a slight makeover. Download Firefox 1.5 and visit awordlike.com to see the latest.

My book writing and blogging have been neglected during the last few weeks. I picked up the golden hammer called Ajax and I've been hunting for golden nails. A few weeks ago I decided that it should be possible to clone the Visual Thesaurus using Ajax, the <canvas> element in Firefox 1.5+ and a server-side call to a WordNet database.

Here is my proof of concept. I'm not proud of any of the code involved, and I'm disappointed that I couldn't get the words to show up yet (resorting to mouseover for now), but I am excited by what <canvas> and Ajax can accomplish together.

[/projects/lvt] permanent link