Spelling checking for blog posts is something which often gets overlooked. Some reasons for this are:
- it is common for people to edit content directly in the editor as it is very convenient, however most editors don’t have a spell checking option
- many people like to compose their content in a software like Microsoft Word. However, copying and pasting from Word can result in garbage, proprietary markup showing up in online posts, so often this step is skipped
However, there are a number of ways around this, and we have compiled 5 easy workarounds for spell-checking blog and CMS posts:
1) Use the Google Chrome browser (http://www.google.com/chrome/) when editing content. Chrome has built in spell-checking, and will highlight errors as you type.
2) Install the Xstandard editor for your blog or CMS. Xstandard can be configured to use the server operating system’s spell-checking libraries. See here for more details http://www.xstandard.com/en/documentation/xstandard-dev-guide/web-services/spellchecker/
3) Install the Google Toolbar. The Google Toolbar has a spell-checking widget which looks like this (highlighted in yellow) - 
. Remember to ‘right click’ > ’stop checking’ when you are finished though - otherwise you will end up with spell checker markup in your posts.
4) If you are using FireFox 2.0 +, you can enable the built in spell check by:
- Open FireFox and visit the URL about:config
- Go to the filter box and enter layout.spellcheckDefault
- Make sure the value is set to 2
5) If you are a developer, install the jQuery javascript framework on your blog or CMS and use the ‘Spell As You Type’ plug-in. This is a client-side spell-checker which underlines misspelled words as you type into a textbox or textarea. You can try it out here - http://plugins.jquery.com/project/spellayt
It is difficult to say which option is the best, although I am quite impressed with the Google Toolbar and Google Chrome options. The Google Toolbar is also available for many different browsers including FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari.
Happy spelling.