We've been beavering away behind the scenes here at Readable HQ, and here's a rundown of what we've done in February 2019. We rely on your feedback to tell us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong, so please let us know at the bottom if you like, or if you don't like, what we've been up to!
Readable.com
Perhaps the biggest change this month was that we have moved to a new domain. Readable.io was a good home for us, but when we had the opportunity to snap up the dotcom, we jumped at the chance. We've kept the app itself at the same address, and you don't need to update any bookmarks - you'll end up at the right place automatically whichever of our domains you use. We hope this will be the last time we move to a new domain!
Spelling and Grammar
The other major update we rolled out this month was the addition of spelling and grammar checking to our software. This is included in everything - text scoring, the API and our website scoring. That's right, we can now check your entire website for possible spelling and grammar issues! You can
get a free website readability report here if you want to see how it works.
More Readability Formulas
The more eagle-eyed among you have already spotted these and got in touch to talk about them - we added several new readability formulas to our offering, including:
- The Fry and Raygor readability graphs (we've updated these to the 21st century and we converted these into algorithms, so you don't need to read scores off the graph any more)
- Lensear Write (good for technical writing)
- Lix and Rix Readability (work with non-English writing)
- FORCAST (suitable for technical manuals)
- Powers Sumner Kearl (ideal for primary grades)
If you want to see a full list of all the algorithms we offer, you can check our
readability formulas here.
Profanity, Name and Lazy Word Detectors
We added a shiny new free tool -
a profanity detector - so if you want to check for possible abusive words and phrases in content, you can do so any time. Our profanity list is very broad, because we'd rather show you something that some people
might consider profane, or something that is profane only in certain circumstances, than risk not alerting you to something you wanted to know about.
We also added a
name detector and a
lazy word detector, and all of these detectors are now available within our main scoring tools and our API!
