After the Deadline IntenseDebate Plugin
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.
Posted by Michael Koenig in features
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Wow. Seriously: Wow!!
This feature is an astonishingly useful addition to ID. A big "Hell, Yes!" to Michael, Raphael and the ID team.
I have a few first impressions that I'd like to share:
The "Checking Spelling" text changes to "Edit Comment" when you are in AtD mode – a more intuitive wording might be "Continue Writing".
It would be helpful if the transition between both modes could be made more obvious. For instance, you could give the text field a very pale yellow background when in AtD mode, reverting back to white when returning to writing mode.
It might also be a good idea to add an extra highlight to the "Continue Writing" button, to cue people who have accidentally entered AtD mode and are confused. You already have the transition between the two different labels but a slight color change or thin red border might make the change more obvious i.e. people will instantly know that the feature is "active".
This is just a random wild thought but, if you could make the button reflect the current mode more clearly, you could probably afford to lose the text labels altogether and just have the spell-check icon – just give it an obvious highlight when in editing mode, no need for the text, people will get the idea and it's generally better to avoid text in the UI if you can anyway. Removing the text would also leave more room for other plugin icons, thereby increasing the number of site owners who opt to use AtD.
The ID AtD implementation seems to be better than the one on WordPress.com, because it is quite easy to end up with some parts of the post field in WP containing the AtD red underlines even when you are back in writing mode, which might be a tad confusing for some people, not sure which mode they are currently in. So, the ID implementation seems a lot cleaner in that respect.
There does seem to be a slight bug when, within AtD mode, you click on a misspelling to see the AtD suggestions but don't pick one and return to writing mode. This sometimes leaves some extraneous text. For instance, I ended one of the above paragraphs with the words "site owners who opt to use AtD". In AtD mode, I was amused to see that the abbreviation "AtD" is not recognized, so, I clicked on it to see what alternatives it suggested. When I returned to writing mode, that sentence changed to "site owners who opt to use AtD.suggest(this);">AtD", clearly some sort of artifact from my use of the pop-up menu. This occurs in both Safari and Chrome under OS X, but not FireFox.
Again, thank you so much for continuing to improve ID, it is exciting to think about where Automattic will be in six months time with innovators such as AtD and ID onboard.
I know what's causing that bug you just mentioned. The highlighting is a regex replace (sorta, it's smarter than just a straight replace, but not by much) and AtD is contained in the links that are made by AtD. I'll address this.
English-only, right? Anyway, that's very nice.
Any plans for additional languages, like the ones IntenseDebate itself now supports? 😉
Nice post! I'm also excited about this feature.
This is great. Now people can understand each other better. Thanks a lot!
Is there a way to use ATD’s WordPress.org plugin with the non-visual editor? I never, ever, use the visual editor, but would LOVE to use this plugin.
Any details would be greatly appreciated please.
Thanks!
😉 good job men!