I was reading Ed Cone's weblog this morning and I noticed his "Things I Want From Radio" column.
Among other things, he wrote "One missing essential [tool] is a spell-checker."
Being french, I agree with him entirely. I don't know how Dave Winer, John Robb or Ray Ozzie can write their essays without typos. It seems that most of the bloggers -- even very high-skilled technical people -- have an excellent background in english language and don't do any mistakes: amazing.
But I do: typos, syntax errors, grammatical mistakes, and that's embarrassing.
At least, I solved the spell-checking problem.
Before uploading something to my weblog, I use SpellCheck.net. It is a free service which works only for english language. You are limited to 5,000 words, which is largely enough -- at least for my needs. If you write in german, italian or french, you'll have to find another tool.
It is really easy to use. You paste your text into the SpellCheck window, and you click the "SpellCheck Text" button." You just have to apply the changes to your original text.
Of course, it's not miraculous, and it will not transform me into a John Dos Passos or a Paul Auster. But it sure helps And I'm sure we'll soon get better tools through Radio.
Source: Roland Piquepaille, August 21, 2002
6:03:13 PM
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