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 extremely pleased to announce that IntenseDebate will now be joining the Automattic team! This is a big day for us and we couldn’t be more stoked about what it means for the future of IntenseDebate.

So what does this mean for you, our valued users? A couple of things:
1.) We will be temporarily going back into an invite only system. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.

2.) You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.

3.) You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including Akismet and Gravatar.

But don’t worry!
You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come! We will continue to improve our comment system and your commenters’ experience. IntenseDebate will continue to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog and build your reader community.

It’s business as usual except we will be ramping up in size and features, and integrating more closely with other Automattic properties to provide an even better commenting experience. The IntenseDebate name and logo isn’t going anywhere – it’s just going to get way more Intense! It’s been a long road to get here, but we’re just getting started…

Posted by Jon Fox in News