I recently noticed a spelling mistake in one of my blog postings.  Yikes!  For a committed spelling geek like me, that’s really really bad! How did it happen?  I blame GMail.  For a time, GMail was making my Firefox crash.  So I switched to IE for a bit, and IE’s <textarea> doesn’t have a built-in spell checker like Firefox does.  Good grief – for my last few blog postings I’d been un-spell-checked without knowing it.

So I needed an online spell checker, and quick.  Spellr.us came to my rescue.  It’s very easy to use, and does everything I wanted:

• One-off on-demand checks
• Regular scheduled checks
• RSS feed of new spelling errors
• Custom dictionaries, that you can populate from the list of unknown words on your site
• The ability to exclude areas from spell checking (eg.  blog comments, though I reserve the right to correct your spelling anyway 🙂 )

And as an unexpected bonus, it will even show you your pages with the spelling errors highlighted – very nice indeed.

Update: At the time of writing, Spellr hadn’t announced their pricing.  They now have.  Their free plan scans 20 pages 5 times a month with no scheduling and no RSS.  Their cheapest monthly plan is $24 and scans 1,000 pages 10 times a month with no RSS.  To get what I’d consider a sensible minimal service, daily scans with RSS, you need to spend $47 a month.

Too rich for my blood.  This might be one of those vanishingly rare cases where a software developer looks at the price of something, says “I could do it cheaper myself”, and is actually right.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 11:18 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.