Website Spell Checking

I occasionally read through old blog posts, just for my own entertainment or to update and refine past thoughts. On a recent read of a post, I came across a couple misspellings. On most posts, I don’t really care too much about misspellings, in fact a lot of the time I try not to worry too much about spelling or grammar — I would rather just write and get ideas on (digital) paper. But for the post in question, it was somewhat frequently read by prospective clients and I usually like to make as good of an impression as possible with those website visitors.

I think ordinarily, the act of spell checking doesn’t seem like a difficult task, but for whatever reason, things sometimes just seem to sneak through. And for that, it felt like it is a good idea to automatically search all pages on my site for spelling errors. It’s a bit of a work in progress, but as part of my regular page scans on Opti, it will now perform a spell check. It’s working well so far, and I’ve corrected quite a few errors, but it is still in need of refinement before I would turn it lose as part of the app.

Add To Dictionary

It was pretty apparent from the beginning that I would need a way to add new words the dictionary, and it was a pretty easy update to get this functionality in place. A next step is to add some “ignore” functionality. The spell checker will sometimes pick up a non-word, or a word fragment that I don’t want to add to the dictionary index, but I do want to remove it from the list of things to fix.

Shortcomings

Opti is a standalone app, so it doesn’t have direct access to the website that is being tested and reviewed. It is admittedly a little clunky to not be able to just fix the error within Opti and instead have to make the fix on the website. This shortcoming will probably just always exist unfortunately. I could probably create a way to directly update a website database from Opti, but I’m not sure if the complications involved are really worth the time and effort to do so.

While the functionality is already pretty useful, the next important step is to create that ignore functionality. At some point down the road, there are some important user interface items to consider, but for now the focus is on getting the functionality in place, and then I’ll work through and clean up the overall experience.