Link of the Week: Yahoo! Currency Converter

Whenever you report a specific amount of money, you should always convert it to the currency your audience uses. Because I cover international gay news, I’m constantly having to convert foreign currency amounts to U.S. dollars. There are many, many online tools for this, but my favorite is the Yahoo! Currency Converter.

By default, Yahoo’s tool converts Dollars to Japanese Yen, but this is not something I often need to do. But you can easily set the link you bookmark to your preferred default conversion. Just perform the desired default conversion and save that link. Now each time you click the link, it’ll be set just that way. I most often need to convert British Pounds to U.S. Dollars, so this is the link I use: Yahoo! Pounds to Dollars.

Note that this particular trick works for many database links — so long as the site uses GET method queries (which usually produce a long-ish link with lots of &-signs in it). IMDB and Wikipedia are two examples. Some sites use POST method queries (IBDB, for example), which don’t give you a usable link you can save.