Damn you, brain! Why can’t YOU run spellcheck?!

I just came back from a late night coffee run and decided to sit down to work a little on my discussion forum before going to bed (I need coffee to sleep… don’t ask).

It was all fine and dandy until I decided to add a little spellcheck option to the input form. Not expecting that many people will use it since this is also meant to be mobile friendly so a lot of posts will likewise be txtspeak gibberish, but I thought it would be nice to have the feature anyway.

Let me preface this by saying that I have never been good at spelling or even an OK at spelling for that matter. I was even rubbish at spelling in Sinhalese when I was a little kid so this isn’t just an English thing. I don’t know if it’s some undiagnosed form of dyslexia or maybe I’m typing faster than the throughput of my cerebral plumbing or visa versa; either way, I just can’t spell.

So when I started writing the spellcheck functionality, I thought it was a simple, straightfoward affair. A dictionary source, a backend response generator and some client-side jQuery witchcraft to make this work without any added burden to the UI.

The burden, it turns out, was to my prefrontal cortex.

E.G. This was meant to be just a simpler version of the spellecheck plugin which comes with TinyMCE. I’m wasn’t using an IDE for the JS side of this, so I figured I’d be fine with just notepad.

What’s wrong with this?

(function() {
	tinymce.create('tinymce.plugins.SpelchekcPlugin', {
		inti : function(ed, url) {
			// Some stuff will happen here
		},
		createControl : function(n, cm) {
			return null;
		},
		getInfo : function() {
			return {
				longname: 'Spellcheck Plugin',
				author : 'eksith'
			};
		}
	});
});

Sometimes, I feel like a construction worker who’s always safe with equipment, always wears a helmet, always on time and always forgets his pants.

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