Minor Missives

ActiveRain will be undergoing an hour of "maintenance" starting today at 4:00pm CST. I wonder what this could mean?

Contrary to popular belief, Jon didn't hire me solely on the basis of my spellchecking fixing abilities. (the shock!) I have a confession to make, loyal readers: instead of working on spellcheck for these past few months, I've been busy pushing the new Localism to completion. (the intrigue!) There – I've said it. I feel better now!

Like any human endeavor, Localism isn't perfect. That bugs a perfectionist like me. The new Localism still has a few (sizable) rough patches:

• You can't leave comments on posts
• Photos uploaded to the old Localism during our internal transitional period may not appear
• Layout issues. This mostly (and ironically) affects those of you who put the most time into making your profile great. We're still working on shoehorning things into our new design. It's like trying on those pants that are one size too small but look really great, so you manage to make it work.

What can you do to help? Use and abuse the new Localism! Let me know what blows up. In direct contradiction to your mother's (loving) edicts, if you break it, I have to fix it.

Don't be afraid to criticize. I'm also very open to gushing compliments.

Update: Jon's got a great (and very official) Q&A up at http://activerain.com/blogsview/586195/Localism-Q-A-Official.

Thanks for the warm welcome. I feel like singing in the rain. (Love puns!)

On the surface, spellcheck seems like a pretty easy problem to solve. You take some text, split it into words, then check each word against the dictionary. Fantastically easy. They shouldn't pay me for this stuff. But computers delight in twisting seemingly simple problems into complex nightmares.

Fun fact: Splitting text into actual words requires roughly 50 rules. Consider punctuation: we have to remove certain marks (periods, exclamation points) but leave others intact (apostrophe). HTML tags also need to be removed while keeping the content safe. Does anyone want my job yet?

In order to keep our servers from melting under the strain of hundreds of simultaneous spellcheck requests, we let the client (that's you!) split the text into words and send that list to the ActiveRain servers. It's a funny thing: web-browsers have wildly diverging ideas about spaces. When you press the spacebar in one browser, it might insert an actual "space" character. Another inserts a Unicode character. Of course, they look exactly the same. Only a petulant computer knows the difference and complains bitterly about it. That's one half of the "AJAX error" story.

The other half of this mystery theater is more embarrassing. The library responsible for parsing the list of words on our servers was out of date. In certain, special conditions (mostly involving apostrophes and quotes), the spellchecker simply gave up. That's one demerit for the naughty server.

My goal is to make ActiveRain work like magic, but I know there are those among you that revel in the occasional peek behind the curtains.

Hope you enjoyed this shocking exposé – stay tuned for more!

I fixed spellcheck.