A few weeks ago I wrote about how you can spell check your blog for free with Spellr.us. To recap, Spellr.us is an automated spell check tool for websites. You can use it to catch any spelling errors that slip into your blog posts without you noticing them.
Spellr.us launched at the recent Techcrunch50 conference, and prior to that Kevin from Spellr.us had asked for ideas about how to draw attention to their demo stand. I made a suggestion which Kevin and the team developed into a t-shirt idea, and now they’ve been kind enough to send me one too!
So thanks to Kevin, Dain and the rest of the team there. Can’t wait to see what is coming up with the new version of Spellr.us!
Spellr.us is a web-based spell check tool that officially launched at last week’s TechCrunch50 conference. Spellr.us helps you maintain high quality content on your website by allowing you to configure regular scans to detect and report any spelling errors that exist. This makes it a great service for bloggers, especially those who need to push content out quickly and may miss spelling errors in their posts. In this post I’ll take you through the basics of setting up your Spellr.us account and scanning your website.
First, go to Spellr.us and register an account. Once you are logged in you are taken to a control panel where you create a new scan.
Enter the URL of your blog, choose the maximum number of pages to scan, and then choose a scanning frequency. You can perform a one time only scan if you are just checking a static content site, or you can schedule regular scans as often as hourly depending on how often you post to your blog.
Next choose the language for your scan and any dictionaries you wish to include. You can also create your own word lists so that non-dictionary words you frequently use in your blog are not detected as errors.
There are lots of other options you can use to tweak your scans even further, such as excluding domain names.
Filter can be used to exclude content that falls within certain DIVs in your site code. The best use of this for bloggers is to exclude comments, so that spelling mistakes made by your visitors do not show up in reports.
Once you are finished with the options you can start the scan, which is submitted to a queue.
The Spellr.us spider will crawl your site and then the data is turned into a report.
When the report is ready you are presenting with some nice graphs showing you the total number of errors as well as the most common errors. A few handy features here are the ability to bulk add words to your custom word lists, and the option to subscribe to an RSS feed for the results of scheduled reports. You are also sent an email with the report results.
At the moment Spellr.us is free and while pricing has not yet been announced the FAQ does say that a free plan for small sites is one of the options that will be available, which puts in within reach of bloggers of any size.
Go check out Spellr.us and let it find your blogging mistakes for you!
Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet writes:
I use Explorer to write posts here because Chrome does not yet support the Wordpress visual editor.
I’m not sure what Dana is on about there, I’m writing this post in Google Chrome and its working just fine.
I recently signed up to Twitter, and have been using it a little here and there (just often enough to notice the problems everyone complains about). One of the reasons I signed up is because people who I follow each week through blogs and podcasts are also using Twitter, often to talk about things that don’t quite merit a blog post. For example Chris Garrett tweeted an article he was reading on why 60% of NBA players go broke after retiring, which was interesting to me but not something Chris would necessarily write a post about.
I’m not a big name in any of the topics I write about here, and certainly not on Twitter. It makes sense to me that I would follow those I am interested in, and maybe over time a few of them and some others would follow me as well and that would become a measure of how well I am doing here with Crane Factory.
So it is with some surprise that I receive this email in my inbox today:
Ty_Coughlin_ (Ty_Coughlin_) is now following your updates on Twitter.
Check out Ty_Coughlin_’s profile here: http://twitter.com/Ty_Coughlin_
You may follow Ty_Coughlin_ as well by clicking on the “follow” button.
Ty Coughlin, who is he and why does he want to follow me? I looked at his Twitter page and immediately remembered, Ty has been advertising his “Reverse Funnel System” over at John Chow’s blog for a while. Which only makes me ask again, why does he want to follow me? Another look at his Twitter page answers that for me.
Is this person following me on Twitter because they are interested in me?
Having just signed up to Twitter Ty seems to be following as many people as possible straight away. At least 49 either auto-followed in return or chose to follow him as well. Being one of 2165 being followed does not suggest there is a lot of interest in me by Ty.
Is this person following me on Twitter because they think I am interested in them?
If a blogger or WordPress enthusiast started following me and I looked at their Twitter page and saw things I was interested in, I would likely follow them in return. This is the very basis of social interaction on the web, bringing together like minded people who can share with each other and benefit from the interaction.
Ty sells a get rich quick investment scheme. That doesn’t interest me in the slightest, and I’m not sure what on my website would give off that impression.
So why is this person following me on Twitter?
When I show up as one of 2165 people being followed by a user, and that user has no apparent interest in me or anything that I would be interested in, I figure the sales pitch is not far behind.
When someone who clearly shares an interest or area of expertise chooses to follow you then you have gained both an interested, and interesting, social interaction in the process.
Here is Australia you can get NBA basketball games live on Foxtel (cable tv network) if you have the sports package that includes ESPN. With the time difference between here and the USA that usually means the games start anywhere between 10:30am and 2:00pm AEST. I’m an NBA fan, so much so that all of my usual blogging time for the last two weeks has basically been eaten up watching Finals games.
Today’s live coverage of Finals Game 6 started at 10:30am. Of course being a work day I was at the office, carefully avoiding all sports related news sites online, using my cable box to record the game at home, looking forward to watching the game tonight, just as I had throughout the playoffs. If the LA Lakers win Game 6 it goes to Game 7 on Friday (our time). If the Boston Celtics win they are the champions.
The story takes a slight detour here. I recently signed up to Twitter, after hearing Leo and the gang talk about it almost non-stop on the This Week in Tech podcast. I checked it out and decided that maybe it would be interesting to follow some of these guys, and others like Darren Rowse who use Twitter as another audience interaction. I haven’t gotten too deeply into it, but it looked promising.
That is until Jason Calicanis posted this little gem on Twitter around 2pm AEST (right about the time Game 6 would be finishing):
Now I wasn’t actually on Twitter.com at the time. I had recently installed Twhirl, a Twitter client, so that I could see whether Twitter is more interesting if you’re actually keeping up to date with the people you follow throughout the day in real time. So while last year during the NBA Finals I just had to avoid web and TV news and make sure my office colleagues knew not to talk about the game, this year I unwittingly opened myself up to more potential spoilers simply by checking out the latest craze in Twitter. And so at 2pm the Twhirl notification popup appears in the corner of my screen, catches my eye, and before I have time to realise whats happening I’ve found out the result of Game 6.
So today I learned a valuable lesson… In these times of instant global communication you need to be careful which lines of communication you leave open if there is something you don’t actually want to know. Especially if you follow heavy twitterboxes like Jason.
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