I looked at someone else's website and spotted that the word correspondence had been misspelt to end dance. Having pointed that out I was embarrassed when I spotted on my own website that I couldn't spell association in places. It is difficult to spot spelling mistakes particularly in what we write ourselves. So I decided to add a step to spell check my personal website before it gets uploaded to the web.

This was a challenge on several fronts. There's a lot of foreign words on my website thanks to the foreign films and TV I like. There's a lot of names on my website which weren't in the word list I started with (even ignoring made up names from SF books). The word list I started with didn't have month names in it.

I also discovered that the markdown renderer I was using to convert markdown to HTML was replacing HTML entity codes with special characters. So é was ending up as é. I tried Redcarpet instead of commonmarker but this behaved the same way. There wasn't an option on them to disable this replacement. Googling revealed other people had hit the problem and been told to work around it themselves.

So before applying the markdown rendering I replace the HTML entity codes with strings that won't be modified, then substitute the HTML entity codes back in afterwards. Sigh.