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

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.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

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.

If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, now is the perfect time! Get started with IntenseDebate.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’re excited to introduce two new IntenseDebate Plugins: AddThis and Facebook Share buttons for your posts!

Facebook Share Button
The Facebook Share button provides your readers with an easy way to share your blog post with all of their Facebook friends. Now you can install the Facebook Share Button with one click through your IntenseDebate Plugins page. Hats off to Dog Lover for developing this plugin! Make sure you check out Dog Lover’s other plugin, TweetMeme Retweet Button.

AddThis Share Button
AddThis is a bookmarking and sharing service. Enabling the AddThis button gives your readers the ability to share your blog post with their friends through a variety of online services (in addition to Facebook). Many thanks to tylerabell for his contribution!

We love offering new ways to enrich your blog and comment section with additional third party services with just a simple mouse click. Just like our other IntenseDebate Plugins, like PollDaddy Polls, Seesmic Video comments, Smiley, and YouTube (among others), there’s no need to mess around with any code in your template. We do it for you. All you have to do is activate it!

Learn more about our Plugins and Plugins API.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Our last blog post announced our redesign of the Edit Profile pages where you manage your IntenseDebate user account. We’ve continued to make our way across other pages in your IntenseDebate.com account, and we’re pleased to introduce our latest redesigns of your account Dashboard and Following pages.

Your Dashboard has had an overhaul and a bit of a face lift to match the new design style, while the Following page has been reorganized and is now easier to maintain.

One of the most noticeable changes to the layout is the sidebar. We’ve added additional tabs to the sidebar for your Dashboard and Following pages, which we think drastically improves ease of navigation. This is a theme that you will continue to see as we set our sights on your blog admin pages.

The coolest part about our redesign is that this is giving us a chance to cleanup and update our CSS and other background code, which fits in with our future plans for localizing IntenseDebate.com. We have just begun our localization project for the comment section interface, so localizing IntenseDebate.com is a longer-term project. Keep an eye out for another localization progress update coming soon.

We’re rolling this out slowly to minimize shell-shock that normally accompanies major interface changes. We’re always interested in feedback, so let us know what you think about the redesign.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features