Automattic has acquired spelling plug-in After The Deadline, which adds spelling, style, and grammar checking to web applications. WordPress and Automattic co-founder Matt Mullenweg announced the acquisition in a blog post.
After The Deadline is an impressive ( WordPress founder Mullenweg was “blown away” by its functionality) spellchecker that lets you customize how the tool analyzes content. Mullenweg says that the new plug-in is already enabled for WordPress blogs. You can go to the proofreading settings in your profile, and then enable After The Deadline by clicking on the icon in the Visual Editor toolbar that has ABC and a green checkmark on it.
The new spellchecker will read your content as you write it and then underline errors and spelling mistakes (red for spelling, green for grammar, blue for style). Similar to other spell check applications, when you click on a flagged word or phrase, you will see a suggested correction, and you can see an explanation of why it’s an error. You can then choose to accept or ignore it.
After The Deadline’s founder Raphael Mudge says the deal was completed in July. The startup will continue to upgrade the tool, though under the Automattic banner. And After The Deadline’s plug-in will remain free for non-commercial use and will soon add support for different languages.
It will be interesting to see when and if this useful feature will be fully integrated in the WordPress hosted blogging software suite. There’s no doubt that a default Word-level spelling and grammar checker is a desirable feature for any blogger. But WordPress didn’t do this with IntenseDebate, the commenting software it bought last September.
WordPress made waves in the blogosphere yesterday when it enabled RSSCloud in post feeds, which is a way for people to get push notification that your RSS feed has updated.
I’ll have to give this plugin a try. I always thought you weren’t suppose to begin a sentence with the word “And” (just like the last sentence in this article). Yet, I see it all the time on “professional” blogs. I don’t know every grammar rule, but this plugin may help.
This software needs to be turned on by default, for blog comments everywhere.
Yesterday.
Just imagine the workout something like this would get on YouTube comments…
Why did they buy it instead of build it? I wonder if it was mainly a talent grab…
Why reinvent the wheel?
The cost of buying a company is comparable with that of developing your own product from scratch.
Obviously in this case, it is probably easier too!
How does this compare with Dictionary on Firefox? I would think all the features supported by this plug-in at some point can be part of browser itself.
I’ll keep this comment short and say most spellcheckers don’t look at context. AtD does. It can do this because it’s on a server and has the luxury of lots of data to draw from.
While there are libraries that do some things, there is nothing that does it all. When we open up the code to AtD, I hope this changes. I’d love to see web apps overtake the word processor with these features. We’re certainly producing enough content in our browser.
Ralph, it would be great to see this applied to comments – the speed at which they are written means they are more prone to mistakes than blog posts.
I would love to see AtD turned on by default for WordPress.com comments, IntenseDebate and, indeed, the other distributed commenting systems, such as Disqus and JS-Kit.
Does the plugin include the ability to apply it to comment composition?
For why AtD matters, see this example of Firefox, Microsoft Word, and After the Deadline attacking The Spell Checker Poem:
http://bit.ly/badpoetry
Congratulations! You done real good, Raphael!
Actually, seeing that they plan to support other languages, there would be big advantages to making AtD as open as possible, encouraging an army of volunteers to contribute their knowledge and time on the basis that the corpus as a whole would be available to other developers and projects.
The real needed spellchecker is for people who English is their second language (like me… and most of the web users).
The context spellchecker is nice but only works in some cases (and you can’t rely on it).
Especially in grammar, sentence like: “I’m do my homework” isn’t been corrected by any spellchecker/grammar correction I know…
Most grammatical corrections are by product of context correct and not as a real grammatical solution…
For folks learning English, there are a lot of things native speakers “just know” that non-native speakers have to acquire through memorization. Irregular verbs, irregular nouns, and homophones all create significant stumbling blocks for many writers. That’s why I focused on these areas first.
WordPress.com
WordPress.com
Self-hosted would make more sense here. And WordPress didn’t buy IntenseDebate, Automattic did.
WordPress.com = hosted blogging service owned and operated by Automattic.
WordPress = the community-driven open source blogging software.
“It will be interesting to see when and if this useful feature will be fully integrated in the WordPress hosted blogging software suite.”
What do you mean by fully integrated? They’ve already added a Proofreading section on your WordPress.com Profile. This uses the AtD technology.