I didn’t expect Spellie to get popular so quickly. It’s only been a week since we officially launched it, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the reception. David and I have been madly trying to squash bugs and improve things while fielding media requests. And while the media coverage has been great for driving increased traffic, it is the feedback from parents and teachers that have been the real highlight to read.
Change Log
We made a lot of changes to Spellie this week to address the feedback we are receiving.
- Spellie got a colour refresh thanks to our friend James Dodds
- Better scaling for mobile and tablet screens
- Theming support and a high-contrast mode for kids with colour vision deficiency
- Nicer keyboard layout and the option for QWERTY
- Emoji unlock notices
- Optional spellchecker to enforce words in the dictionary
Full release notes.
Media Recap
February 12. The first piece that was written about Spellie just took a bunch of content from my blog post and republished it. I was a bit upset they never reached out for permission, but it drove a ton of initial traffic to the site.
February 13/15. A bunch of parenting blogs and magazines picked up the Spellie buzz and wrote short pieces about it.
February 15. CBC was the first organization to reach out for a real interview. Stephen Quinn is awesome, but it was stressful being on live radio. It was great to talk about the origin of Spellie and how we’re building this for kids first.
February 18. CBC also did a written article with quotes from the radio interview. They included a cute photo of Astrid and I.
Stay tuned for more Spellie changes and keep the feedback coming.
Canadian Veggie 
Love this, your mom would and is so proud of you.
Keep smiling
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Congratulations, Chris – what an experience!
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Just discovered this and wanted to say you’ve done a great job. I wanted to do something like this myself but could not find a pre-compiled list of words appropriate to a younger age range.
Are there any English words spelled the American way in your word lists? I don’t actually know how words like colour are spelled in Canada.
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Thanks.
The dictionary of valid words contains both Canadian and American spellings, but we were conscious to skip words like COLOR and FAVOR from the daily puzzles.
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[…] Christopher Porter wrote about the development of Spellie on his blog: https://canadianveggie.com/2022/02/11/introducing-spellie/ and https://canadianveggie.com/2022/02/19/week-1-spellie-updates/ […]
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