While reading, typos and spelling mistakes in texts can be annoying. I myself make a lot of typos and spelling mistakes — but that doesn't mean that they annoy me any less when I stumble over one while reading. I personally already use vims built in spell checker as well as LanguageTool to check my texts — but that doesn't find everything. Asking someone to proofread every text improves the situation greatly but some mistakes will still remain. And more importantly: you might not have someone willing to proof-read everything you write. I thought it would be nice to have an easy way to report small mistakes. Others use the comment section for that — but my blog hasn't comments — on purpose — and most people won't write an email for submitting a typo they found while reading.

For this reason I wrote hewa. It adds an edit-button to every entry of my blog, that allows you to edit the page in the browser and send me your suggestion. The edit mode opens instantly, no loading of any sort of editor. Simply change the text, click save and I'll receive the patch.

Today I'm activating the first version of hewa in my blog. It's still not very mature and might not run with proprietary browsers like IE. It's written in JavaScript — without jQuery or any other libraries — and Python with Flask. I will of course release the source code under a free license. But I still need to clean up the code before I can do that.

This is also an experiment: I'm not sure if people will use it or if I'll end up receiving more spam and vandalism than actual corrections. Spam and vandalism is also the reason that I don't apply the changes to the text but rather save the diffs. I have a tool that allows me to look at those patches and apply or drop them.

hewa blog