So, I’ve been the worst blogger ever. Got my head turned by Twitter, other parts of life flared up, and next thing I know I haven’t posted to Errata in over four months.

This is a tentative step towards getting back on the bike. I spent this weekend refactoring some of the innards of poor neglected Wordie. The results of this ongoing effort will be largely invisible, and mostly for my own benefit–some of the internals were written in such haste that now, months or years later, what’s going on under the hood is a little hazy, even to me. So I’m reorganizing internals*, fixing a few longstanding bugs, and along the way hopefully improving performance, to handle the slow, steady increase in traffic Wordie continues to see. Once I’ve cleaned house I’ll be in a much better position to start adding some new features.

One small feature you can see right now is a new link to Forvo.com under each word. Forvo is sort of like Wordie–user submitted words–but it focuses on audio pronunciations, rather than, uh, whatever it is that Wordie focuses on. Click the last little square under antipodes for an example. It’ll bring you to a page on Forvo where you can hear the proper Canadian pronunciation of the word.

* For those who care, I’m also bolting on, after the fact, a proper test suite, having recently gotten the TDD religion.