website spell check faq

Should I spell check before in depth proofreading?

Yes. This often produces the best results for a given level of effort. Automated spell checking will highlight spelling errors with the least amount of effort. By fixing spelling errors first, the editor or writer avoids being sidetracked by the spelling errors. Reading clean text allows the reader to concentrate on other factors that might improve the page.

But can't both be done at the same time?

Well, yes. But, it takes a great deal of discipline to avoid a false sense of progress. Most people want to improve their pages. If the page has already been spell checked, then the improvement must come from another area. Therefore, starting with a clean page encourages real readability improvements separate from spelling. This happens because the entire editing session can be devoted to the informational content as opposed to the mechanics of the page.

What changes do I need to make at my end?

None. The service is completely hosted on our servers. You only have to allow access to the pages just as you would any normal visitor to your website.

Are there any hidden charges?

No. The service charges are fully disclosed on the pricing schedule. Clients purchase usage credits which are consumed at the rate of 1 credit per page. If the job has 1 page, 1 credit is deducted from the customer account balance. Additionally, unused credits do never expire.

How much information is required to open an account?

Just your email address. Every new account is allocated free usage credits upon opening. Purchasing additional credits does not require any additional information be given to us. Credit card or banking information is processed by an external third party processor. We do not collect, store, or have access to that information.

Can I have more than one free account?

No. The purpose of the trial is to introduce you to the spell check service. It is not a means of acquiring the service for free.

How much control is available over the crawling engine?

A number of characteristics can be controlled. These include:

• page retrieval rate specified in mbps
• directory depth
• maximum number of pages
• start time
• daily, weekly or monthly scheduled jobs
• one shot jobs

Do you have custom dictionaries?

Yes, they are self maintained by each account holder. In addition, we review custom dictionaries for possible inclusion in the standard dictionaries.

What areas of the html page are scanned for spelling?

All areas of the page that might affect the ability of your visitors to find you are scanned for spelling errors. This includes the keyword meta tag, the description meta tag, alt text attributes, title text attributes, title tags and all on page text.

Can a page be marked as hidden or ignored?

Yes. Once you have reviewed a page for spelling errors, and you no longer wish to review it in the future, you can mark it as hidden. It will still be crawled and processed during a spell check job, but it will not be displayed. This allows you to suppress flagging of pages that contain terms that are not in either the standard dictionary or your custom dictionary.

What additional factors are available from the analysis

In addition to spelling errors, we also analyse and report on the following:

• site page count
• site word count
• site word length distribution
• site total errors
• site unique words
• site unique errors
• page length
• page word count
• page total errors
• page unique errors
• page word length distribution
• page semantic tag structure map
• page emphasised words (key words)

What types of pages are processed?

Any text or html page can be processed. The engine currently retrieves any linked page with the following extensions: none, .txt, .htm, .html, .shtml, .asp, .aspx, .php, .cgi, .pl, and .py. If you have any other extensions that need to be included, just let us know.

Can the engine process SSL pages?

Yes. The engine handles https sites in the same way as http.

Can the crawling engine handle password protected websites?

Yes. You will need to assign a username and password in the control panel. A unique username and password created for the purpose is suggested.

Can the engine access intranet sites?

Yes. It requires that the engine be allowed through your firewall. If your network personnel need assistance in the configuration, they can contact us for technical support.

Do you respect the robots.txt exclusion standard?

Yes. If there is a matching entry indicating that we should not crawl the site, then the site will not be crawled. This helps to prevent abusive or malicious use of the service. Site administrators can edit robots.txt to allow the crawl. Alternatively, it can be arranged to ignore robots.txt on a site by site basis. Such arrangements require authorisation by the administrative contact of the site as listed in the whois information of the domain.

What special characters are recognised and processed by the spell check engine?

The spell check engine recognises the special characters found in this table of ISO-8859-1 html character entity codes.

Is there any specialised handling of html?

Yes. For more information please see html spell check features.

Will page retrieval affect visitor statistics?

Javascript based statistics will not be affected because the crawler will not trigger the beacon requests. Log based statistics will be affected because the server logs every request. In that case, you can filter those requests in your log analysis program.

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"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery