https://broken-notebook.com/Free word tools, and plain notes on spelling, word play and writinghttps://broken-notebook.com/build/draggable-word-tiles-pointer-events/https://broken-notebook.com/build/draggable-word-tiles-pointer-events/2026-10-20How to make draggable tiles that work with mouse, touch and pen using Pointer Events and setPointerCapture, with touch-action, keyboard support, reading tiles back into text and sharing state in the URL hash.https://broken-notebook.com/build/html-spellcheck-attribute/https://broken-notebook.com/build/html-spellcheck-attribute/2026-10-15How the spellcheck attribute works on textarea, input and contenteditable, how lang chooses the dictionary, related attributes (autocorrect, autocapitalize), privacy concerns with cloud spell check, and when to turn it off.https://broken-notebook.com/writing/writing-prompts-word-tiles/https://broken-notebook.com/writing/writing-prompts-word-tiles/2026-10-13Twenty-four original prompts and Oulipo-style constraints to use with magnetic poetry tiles, from one-minute warm-ups to lipograms and N+7, for writers, classrooms and families.https://broken-notebook.com/writing/american-vs-british-spelling/https://broken-notebook.com/writing/american-vs-british-spelling/2026-10-08The handful of patterns that explain most differences between American and British spelling (-or/-our, -er/-re, -ize/-ise, doubled l, -ense/-ence), where they came from, and how to stay consistent.https://broken-notebook.com/build/levenshtein-distance-javascript/https://broken-notebook.com/build/levenshtein-distance-javascript/2026-10-06How edit distance works, a readable dynamic-programming implementation in JavaScript, the Damerau transposition variant, a memory-light version with early exit, and how to use it to suggest spelling corrections.https://broken-notebook.com/writing/homophones-spell-checkers-miss/https://broken-notebook.com/writing/homophones-spell-checkers-miss/2026-10-01Why a spell checker cannot catch their/there/they're or affect/effect, the confusable pairs that matter most, quick tests to choose the right one, and how to proofread for them.https://broken-notebook.com/build/how-spell-checkers-work/https://broken-notebook.com/build/how-spell-checkers-work/2026-09-30A clear tour of spell-checker design: word lists and affix files, detecting errors, generating and ranking suggestions with edit distance, phonetic keys, symmetric delete and context-aware correction.https://broken-notebook.com/writing/commonly-misspelled-words/https://broken-notebook.com/writing/commonly-misspelled-words/2026-09-24Why words like accommodate, separate, definitely and necessary keep getting misspelled, grouped by the kind of trap they set, with memory aids that actually work.https://broken-notebook.com/2010/10/20/we-need-to-talk-communicating-with-php-and-jquery/https://broken-notebook.com/2010/10/20/we-need-to-talk-communicating-with-php-and-jquery/2026-09-17How a web page and a PHP script exchange data: sending JSON with fetch or jQuery.ajax, reading it in PHP with php://input, answering with json_encode, and handling errors and security.https://broken-notebook.com/magnetic/about/https://broken-notebook.com/magnetic/about/2026-09-10The story behind magnetic poetry, from Tristan Tzara's 1920 recipe for a Dada poem and the Surrealists' exquisite corpse to Burroughs and Gysin's cut-ups and the 1993 fridge kit, plus what it means for your own writing.https://broken-notebook.com/spell_checker/documentation/https://broken-notebook.com/spell_checker/documentation/2026-09-03How the Letterbench spell checker works: where its 72,000-word list comes from, how words are tokenized and matched, how suggestions are generated and ranked, and how to build one for your own page.