I set a bookmark in Firefox with a keyword of z and a location of http://zhongwenlookup.appspot.com/scripts/lookup?character=%s. So now I can just type z 長 into Firefox and end up at the zhongwen.com entry. If your computer uses some other encoding (e.g. big5) or you're using a different browser, you might also need to add &ienc=big5 to make it work. You can use any encoding that's available via Python's codecs.py on Google's appengine.
This site has no affiliation with zhongwen.com. I made it because I use that site a lot while learning Kanji and wanted a quicker way lookup charaters. The site and book are aimed towards looking up a character via pronunciation, components or meaning but when the character is on your computer I want to be able to just look it up directly. If you find this useful, buy a copy of Mr Harbaugh's book, without which there would be no zhongwen.com!
This site is by Fergal Daly, you can contact me at fergal@esatclear.ie or pop over to my blog. You can also find a bash script there which will take characters on the command line and open the page in Firefox.