Every now and than then their there are times when we all slip-up with a misused word in a blog post. It’s slightly embarrassing to find after you publish your post, especially if someone has to point it out to you. Thankfully Raphael Mudge recently joined us at Automattic and is saving us from making careless mistakes with his intelligent proofreading technology, After the Deadline (download it here for your blog/website).
After The Deadline brings cutting-edge contextual spell checking, grammar checking, and style checking to the web, in a seamless service integration with the most popular online publishing tools and platforms (WordPress, TinyMCE, etc.). Through a combination of carefully-tuned statistical machine learning and NLP techniques, AtD’s sophisticated language models can catch and suggest corrections to subtle errors in context – even in poetry! http://bit.ly/badpoetry
AtD is that second set of eyes we all love to have to proofread our blog posts. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have that same expert spelling and grammar checking for your comments? Now you can with the After the Deadline IntenseDebate plugin! Raphael has been hard at work to bring you a lightweight solution to catch any spelling, misused words, and grammar errors before you post your comment.
Give it a try when you post a comment. After typing your comment select the “Check Spelling” icon at the top right of comment textbox. Misspelled words will have a red underline while grammar errors will have a green underline. Because AtD uses artificial intelligence to identify misused words, you no longer have too to worry about contextual errors. Click the underlined word and you’ll be presented with alternative suggestions to correct your mistake.
Visit your Plugins page in your Blog Account admin panel to locate and activate the AtD plugin. Make sure you check out the rest of the IntenseDebate plugins while you’re there like PollDaddy Polls, Seesmic video comments, Smileys, and loads more. Learn more about our Plugins and Plugins API.
We’re excited to announce the latest release for our IntenseDebate.com interface redesign: your brand new Admin Panel and Blog Account pages. We’re sure that you’ve noticed the unmistakable design changes to the Blog Overview, Moderation, Comment History, Plugins, Settings and Layout, and Tools pages, and we think you’ll agree that it’s a major improvement!
Over the past weeks we have released redesigns for our homepage, your User Account page, and your account Dashboard and Following page. These releases feature our new sidebar navigation. So far your feedback has been excellent, and we’re pleased to hear that you’ve found it to be much improved (we were told that it was “life changing” and we agree!).
Our old blog account pages were definitely due for an overhaul, especially the Settings page. That was our go-to page when we introduced new admin features, and admittedly it was getting a bit crowded. The redesign embraces the sidebar and has split your old Blog Settings into a couple of different tabs:
Blog Account overview: manage email notification settings, blog title and RSS.
Moderation: for all of your spam and moderation management tools.
Layout: customize your comment section components and language options.
Comments: manage Facebook Connect, Twitter Sign-in, along with all of your other comment settings.
Custom CSS: this is a brand new tab where you can style and add new CSS to your comment section without having to upload files anywhere!
Miscellaneous: customize your comment links among other elements.
Give it a try and let us know what you think! There’s more to come (especially for our moderation page) so keep an eye on our blog for more info.
By now you’re all aware that we’ve been working on allowing you to display your comment section in different languages, and today we’d like to make that available to everyone! Thanks to a fantastic effort from 24 volunteers collaborating across 5 continents, we’re able to offer 12 new languages to you right off the bat, with more languages hopefully coming soon. Here are the new languages that we’re releasing, along with the awesome folks who contributed to each translation:
To change the language used in the comments area on your site, just go into the fancy new Settings & Layout section of intensedebate.com and the pick the Layout option on the left. At the bottom of that page you can pick from the list of supported languages.
These are first runs of the translations, so please take a look and see what you think. If there are any words you think might make more sense as something different, then please drop us a line at labs@intensedebate.com, letting us know what language you’re looking at and where the text you’re talking about appears. It might be easiest if you send us a screenshot showing exactly which bit of text you’re talking about.
Thanks for all of your patience, and another huge thank you to the wonderful volunteers who have made this possible.
If you don’t see your language and you’re interested in translating, please email us at the address above. We would love your help!
We’re excited to introduce a new enhancement for our Facebook Connect implementation: share comments back to Facebook. We recently rolled this out, so if you use Facebook Connect to post comments in IntenseDebate then you might have noticed this.
Our Facebook Connect integration is a cool way to let your readers post comments using their Facebook profiles. With our latest enhancement they can now opt to share their comments with their Facebook friends when they post using Facebook Connect. Just like our “tweet this” Twitter integration, this is a great way to get your friends in the debate and drive new traffic to your blog and comments.
When you’re logged into Facebook Connect you’ll notice a new “Share on Facebook” checkbox just below the comment textbox on the right. Select that when you post using your Facebook Connect account and you’ll have the option to customize the text that you post back to Facebook.
Last week I was in Manila where I was lucky enough to attend WordCamp Philippines on behalf of Automattic (our parent company) and IntenseDebate. In case you’re not familiar with it:
WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.
I had a chance to speak to a group of around 150 Filipinos who are really into blogging (and WordPress in particular) which was a great honor and also great fun (I was the first speaker of the day!). My trip was rather timely now that we’re working to localize IntenseDebate, and it was especially fitting since a Filipino translation of IntenseDebate came in just days before I left!
Mozilla co-hosted the event, providing sponsorship as well of one of the speakers, Seth Bindernagel, Director of Localization at Mozilla. Seth delivered a presentation titled “A quick look into the Mozilla community through the lens of localization” which was right up my alley. I got a chance to talk to him at the event and will be spending a little bit of time with him in the near future to explore Mozilla’s approach to localization for projects like Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. As we continue forward with our localization, we will be looking at how we can take some of the lessons they learned and apply them to IntenseDebate.
By leveraging the experience of one of the biggest and most successful open source projects (other than WordPress of course!), we’ll be able to make the localization process easier for you and us, and make IntenseDebate a more “native” experience for everyone.
Please keep an eye on our blog for an upcoming post detailing the latest progress on our localization project.
And now to close out my post, I thought I’d share one of my experiences with the local cuisine: my first taste of a balut. (I’m the one on the left. 😉 ) Check out my full post on my blog.
Every now and than then their there are times when we all slip-up with a misused word in a blog post. It’s slightly embarrassing to find after you publish your post, especially if someone has to point it out to you. Thankfully Raphael Mudge recently joined us at Automattic and is saving us from making careless mistakes with his intelligent proofreading technology, After the Deadline (download it here for your blog/website).
Give it a try when you post a comment. After typing your comment select the “Check Spelling” icon at the top right of comment textbox. Misspelled words will have a red underline while grammar errors will have a green underline. Because AtD uses artificial intelligence to identify misused words, you no longer have too to worry about contextual errors. Click the underlined word and you’ll be presented with alternative suggestions to correct your mistake.
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