I am happy to announce that Textclean.ca is now live. Textclean is a simple utility to clean text when copying and pasting from programs like Microsoft Word into web based applications like WordPress.
The utility was originally part of a Content Management System (CMS) I started building in the late 1990s while I was returning to University. Between going back to university, raising a family (3 kids at the time), and running my web development and hosting business, I became obsessed with writing tools, in Perl, to automate web-site building and maintenance and database management. I was looking to making the process of build and managing web-sites simpler and faster. I called the platform, PBDBA (Page Builder-DB Admin) and I created many client web-sites using the platform over the years.
One of the utilities that was part of PBDBA was the text clean utility. So many people would use Word, Wordstar, or Word Perfect. (shows you how long it has been around) to write content, but when editors/content creators went to paste their content into a web form, the copy got all messed up. The commercial word processors with adding characters like curly quotes, ellipses, and em-dashes to name a few. Text clean was written to convert all the high ASCii characters into their text friendly equivalents.
Fast forward to present day and I was removing the last remnants of the old PBDBA system from the last site still using it, when I started to get emails and calls that the text clean utility was gone and that a lot of people were still using it. To be honest, I was stunned. I had no idea it was still be used by so many people.
So I made the decision to update and port the utility into its own web-site. Check it out and feel free to use it yourself. Visit https://textclean.ca.