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Archive for May, 2008

Dictionary Clarification - Summary Feature

Friday, May 30th, 2008

I was in error yesterday - the custom dictionary feature is available on our internal accounts only, they will be made live across all beta accounts next week - apologies for the confusion.

Adam has also been working on a summary page that will evolve into a printable version of the report so many people have asked for.

Kevin

Another spellr.us Review and Spelling Discussion Link

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Another blogger has reviewed spellr.us - who would have thought a gaming site would find spellr.us interesting.

They also refer to a discussion about the worst spelling mistakes - which almost results in a decent discussion about the topic but doesn’t quite get there!

Kevin

Number of Pages in Scans | Beta Round 2

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I nearly forgot to mention, we have given beta testers the options of increasing their scan pages up to 10 000!

Enjoy and give us your feedback.

People who registered for beta accounts round 2 should receive their logins by Monday.

Kevin

 

Custom Dictionaries! :) | System Tweaks

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Well custom dictionaries should be working - hooray - thanks to Adam (and Charl) - they have separated tasks but have some cross over and I lose track sometimes of who is doing what.

Charl also worked through the night to find an obscure seg fault error - which he found the cause of!

Please let us know your thoughts on custom dictionaries.

We are aware of a couple of spider funnies (eg not parsing html properly and reporting some html as spelling errors) - Charl and Adam will look into this and no doubt resolve it.

Looking forward to the feedback on the custom dictionaries.

Thanks.

Kevin and the spellr.us team.

Custom Dictionaries & Upgrades

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Well Adam and Charl have been locked in the dungeon for the last few days sorting out the custom dictionaries as well as preparing the system for a higher level of usage.

We are also constantly working at refining the algorithm to really report as few false positives as possible.

If you have had a few funny glitches over the last few days please hang in there.  We are aiming to rock solid stability in the short term.

The good news is that custom dictionaries are not far away at all.

Please continue to keep the feedback rolling in - we read and respond to every piece of feedback.

Kevin and the spellr.us team.

 

Another great review and more feedback

Monday, May 26th, 2008

Another one of our beta testers wrote a review - all the way from Belgium!

One of the other beta testers who is from a seriously large and seriously global company sent in this feedback:

“This is awesome!!!!! Great work :) Can’t wait to share this with my co-workers!”.

It is this type of feedback that encourages me to keep sending food and water down to Charl and Adam in the developers’ dungeon! ;)

Kevin

 

Why We Are Like Google

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Really … we are! :)

Google’s main aim of existence is to present search results that match peoples’ search requests as accurately as possible.

spellr.us main aim is to point people to their genuine spelling errors.  The better we can do this - the more compelling our product will be.

spellr.us and Google both have to try make match what the user wants with the data it has to sift through.

Custom dictionaries on spellr.us will go a long way to getting rid of a large batch of false positives and thinning out the signal to noise ratio.

Please if you are a beta tester provide us with feedback on your ideas how we can refine your results.  This feedback is invaluable to us.

You can either click on the feedback form in your account or you can mail admin@spellr.us .

Over time we really do want spellr.us to hone in on only your genuine errors.

Kevin

End of Beta Round 1

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Hi All

Well the last couple of days have been exciting.

All our beta testers should now have their login details.

Last night Sydney time was the busiest time yet for spellr.us with lots of beta testers scanning away.

If you have not received your login details or are having problems please email admin@spellr.us and we can get one set-up for you.

If you are not yet a beta tester - please register on http://spellr.us as we will be registering round  2 of beta testers this Monday.

We have read and replied to every bit of feedback and we thank everyone for their time and effort in giving us feedback.

Everyone is begging us for custom dictionaries and printable versions and also asking us to tweak formatting and a couple of other bits and pieces. 

We hear you - custom dictionaries are not too far off (thanks Adam and Charl).

We had a request to add Swedish - which has now been added (thanks Charl).

Some selective feedback:

  • “Wow! I’ve just received the invite, and just tried out my (under construction) website. One word; “Wow”. this is great! Ok, it’s a bit scary to see my website plastered with orange and red, but you guys are onto something truly useful.Indeed, I’d say it’s essential! Spelling mistakes make things look unprofessional, shoddy and quite frankly rubbish, so helps get the detail (which is as critical as the design or colour scheme) on a website spot on.Great job, and keep up the hard work! ” William
  • “Fantastic little tool that found a few mistakes on blog posts, keep up the good work this is an awesome tool.” Azzam www.socialprofilr.com
  • “Very very nice. It actually caught a few errors that even our editors did not catch. I like the fact that it looks like at some point you will be able to customize things such as “add to my words” etc. I like what I see.” Brandon http://www.LateralLineCo.com

And we scored a nice video review at http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/podcasts/2008/05/20/spellrus-beta-review-screencast/ (click on play).

So over the next week or so keep an eye out for custom dictionaries, account configuration (password change) and ongoing formatting tweaks.

Kevin

First spellr.us Beta Feedback In

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Well we continue to roll out our beta accounts.

Some feedback already in:

  • “Make it easy to give feedback!” - we have added a super easy feedback form in the spellr.us account so users can make feedback
  • “Custom dictionaries” - we hear all of you! :) This is definitely the most requested feature and we are rolling it out soon - hang in there for a while.
  • “Would be great to have a print to PDF” -we are looking at the best way of printing to PDF for what sometimes is a long report.
  • “What is with the time zone?” - currently the time zone reported is on our server at Rackspace.  We will eventually be adding a time zone setting so you can see when your reports were run in your time zone.

And thank you for all the positive feedback too.

We read every single bit of feedback so please drop us a line with any thoughts.

All beta accounts should be active be active by Tuesday night Sydney Australia time - approximately Tuesday morning US time.

Kevin

Revised FAQ On The Way

Friday, May 16th, 2008

We will be upgrading the FAQ on the site over the next few days.

We will be providing a little more detail on the product and service - including limitations and hints for best usage.

Kevin

 
 
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