Smallegan.com

Google Toolbar 3 Beta has been taking a lot of heat for their auto link feature, which by the way you can disable (but we aren’t going there). I however have not heard a lot about the new spell checking feature. I have seen a lot of plugins available for wordpress, .Text, etc.. for spell checking your entries. Most of the time these things involves some setup. I have not used any of these so I really cannot speak to exactly how long that might take. I have however found that with Beta3 of Google’s Toolbar, I am able to spellcheck my posts.

When my cursor is positioned in my Post box I can click on the “Check” button and the toolbar will take control of my text box and it will find and allow me to correct any spelling errors that I may have made. Anyone who uses a web based publishing tool should give this a shot, it is very simple and cool. Since it is web browser based you will of course have to use IE 5.0 or higher.

Now that I think about it this would also be a great tool to use when commenting on other people’s blogs. I have yet to see spell check in that situation?

From a techie point of view a couple of things are notable. It seems that what the toolbar does is turn the existing text box into standard text. This is evident when you right click on a misspelled word and choose edit. It gives you a text box to type in which I am pretty sure isn’t possible. A text box within a text box that is. It could however just be DHTML placement? I am unsure and not really interested in picking it apart since it works so well But be sure to drop me a comment and let me know if you find more out about how it works!

Update: You don’t actually have to have your cursor in the text box. When you press check it checks all of the text box’s on the page.