Is your Spelling Check in the Mail?

This is a gender-neutral, non-partisan and multicultural public service announcement that is intended to slightly improve the quality of the blogosphere.

If you’re a male, female, intersexed, transgendered, Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian, authoritarian, capitalist, communist, socialist, fascist, Nazi, anarchist, imperialist, isolationist, red-stater, blue-stater, swing-stater, gay, straight, bi-sexual, asexual, liberal, conservative, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Satanist, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Scientologist, devout, doubter, atheist, agnostic, activist, apathetic, progressive, regressive, pragmatist, rationalist, generalist, propagandist, flame baiter, etc, blogger and/or blog commenter of any shape, size color or style you must check your spelling for the betterment of the blogosphere.

None of us are above the occasional spelling or typographical error. And since there are several freeware, browser extension utilities available to help us to catch those little mistakes and avoid the bandwidth-wasting wrath and flames of the legions of self-appointed spelling police who inhabit the blogosphere and other forums, there are no excuses other than perhaps, “I’m too lazy to be bothered with such trivialities as proper spelling and accurate typewriting.”

SpellBound is a port of the spellchecker code and user interface from the Mozilla Suite’s Composer that enables spell checking in web forms such as html textarea / input elements (html input password elements are not checked by SpellBound) and rich text form elements. This allows you to spell check forms (e.g. message board posts, blog entries, wysiwyg, etc.) before submitting them when using your Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Suite browser.

ieSpell is a[n] Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage (form fields). It should come in particularly handy for heavy web mail and/or forum users. The program installs as a new button in the IE toolbar – after filling a form, just hit the ieSpell button and it pops up a dialog, similar to the MS Word spell check.

tinySpell is a small spell checking program, that automatically spell checks a selected word that is copied to the clipboard. You can also set tinySpell to check your spelling on the fly while you are typing and alert you by sound whenever it detects a misspelled word. The program runs in the system tray and suggests correct spellings via mouse click menu or hotkey. Additional features include a private dictionary and an auto-replacement feature. Unique and compact, great for quick spell checking.

These are but three spell checking solutions out of many that are available. Searches on the string, ["spell checker" web browser freeware] on Yahoo and Google return many results.

These programs won’t improve your content or your grammar, but they will help to minimize spelling and typographical errors, thus lending you little bit more credibility by making you appear educated enough to at least know how to spell.