I use WordPress for my blog. This is the third blog software I have tried and I think I have decided this is the software to stick with. I think it has the bulk of the (free) market share, lots of good themes, lots of good plugins. The two lacking features are (1) a WYSIWYG editor and (2) a spell checker. The WYSIWYG editor is supposedly coming in the next version. I’ll wait for that. The spell checker is a slightly different story.
There are at least 2 or 3 spell checker plugins for WordPress. I have tried them. I didn’t really like they way they worked. The ones I played with didn’t seem to handle tags in the post very well (i.e., putting html in the formatting, links, etc.). Notably, when I posted from Flickr it the spell checkers would often rewrite the HTML. So, I gave up on WordPress and Spell Checking. I was just using Ultraedit to do my spell checking. Until I found some postings talking about using Firefox browser plugins to do spell checking. I found two great plugins to do this!
The first one is Google Toolbar for Firefox. This is really slick. With a click of a button in the toolbar you can spellcheck any form controls on the page. Presumably it uses AJAX to do the spell checking. It is nice, lets you have your own dictionary, etc. The spell checking is done right within the page you are working on. I highly recommend this extension.
The second one is Spellbound – Spellchecker for Firefox. It is also really slick. With this, you right click in a form control and select Check Spelling. The only real minus (or plus) for Spellbound is that it uses its own window to do the spell checking. Spellbound has the advantage that it can use a bunch of different dictionaries, but, because of that it takes an extra step to setup — you must not only install the plugin but also find and install the dictionary that you want.
Which one do I like better, which will I end up using? I am not sure. I will play with both and see. Kudos to Firefox and the extension developers for making these kind of technologies possible.