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The web’s most useful tools and sites

The World Wide Web isn’t all fun and games. This isn’t television! This isn’t an arcade! This is computing! We’ve got high-powered work machines tuned into this thing! With keyboards and mice and productivity software and everything!

These are the most useful tools and sites on the web, as nominated by the readers of Kottke.org:

WORDS
Thesaurus.com
Linguee
Online Etymology Dictionary (three different people suggested this! which suggests to me that y’all are my kind of people)
Green’s Dictionary of Slang
Behind the Name (which is a baby name site I think?)
Wiktionary
OneLook

TIME AND WEATHER
Time.is
Time and Date
Weather Underground
ABC 13 Southeast Texas Weather (from a reader who lives in Houston)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (this site is very cool)

KNOWLEDGE REPOSITORIES
Baseball Reference
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Wikimedia Commons
Wikipedia
Old Maps Online
Internet Archive/Wayback Machine
BOOOOOOOM

CONTENT DISCOVERY
Digg
Nowness
Metafilter
Kottke (you’re already here)
Can I Stream It?
TV Muse

CODING AND DESIGN STUFF
Tampermonkey
Stack Overflow
CopyPasteCharacter
Cool Tools
0 to 255
Wordmark.it
Random Password Generator
Google Fusion Tables

SAVE IT FOR LATER
Pocket
Ffffound!
FutureMe.org (write a letter to yourself in the future)

SOLVING UNUSUAL PROBLEMS
This to That (Glue Advice)
Soapcalc (Making soap)
waifu2x (Anime character generator)
Random Oblique Strategies Online

BROWSER EXTENSIONS
Shut Up (hides comments)
OneTab (collapses all your browser tabs into a sortable, exportable list)

SEARCH ENGINES
Google, Craigslist, DuckDuckGo, the usual crap

A lot of you seem like you have really cool jobs.

(A special thank you to Google Forms for making this possible.)