You know what’s a cool feeling? When you realize one of your apps that you thought was getting very little attention is actually being visited a non trivial number of times a day. Time Until is receiving close to 100 users a day! One thing I’m realizing: the more popular my most popular apps become, the greater the likelihood that collateral apps get a ranking boost.

This month users are up 8.13% Not bad considering this is a shorter month with an extra Saturday and Sunday. Revenue ended up at $165.47 for the month.

This was a light progress month due to illness, but I did finally get that Website Spell Checker finished. I then proceeded to find 238 misspelled words on datayze.com. That’s not 238 instances of a misspelled word, but 238 uniquely incorrect spellings. I was perhaps a tad over due.

The new spell checker necessitated an massive update to the suite of website apps, refactoring internal code as well as the overall look and feel of the apps, in order to be useful. Even though I made improvements to the underlying spell checker, there were still a number of domain specific words that my spell checker would never be able to recognize as correct. Words like “datayze” which would be misspelled in any other context. 336 such words on my site, to be exact. When I ran the Website Spell Checker over my site, it identified 578 possibly misspelled words, only 41% which were actually misspelled.

The website spell checker is unusable with so many false positives. The time required to go through a list of that size makes it less likely that I’d check the spelling of my site with any regularity. I wanted to be able to dismiss words the spell check should ignore, and to save my work so I didn’t have to keep dismissing the same words every time I wanted to use the tool. Thus I added an “export to CVS” button. Now after I tell the spell checker which words to ignore I can export the list and save it for next time.

Since this seemed like a handy feature I went ahead and added an “export to CVS” function for all data tables in my other website apps as well. Now you can save a copy of the html errors with the Site Validator, or the number of unique phrases with the Thin Content Checker.

Sadly that’s pretty much the end of the updates in April. Ah well, May is a new month (with an extra Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.) I should have better progress this month. We’re only 15 hours in to May and it’s already looking to be a very strong day.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft