After the Deadline

Today, I’ve released an updated WordPress plugin for After the Deadline.  This plugin really revamps the AtD experience, I think you’ll like it.  [Get it here]

The most obvious change, most errors are optional and disabled by default.  AtD still checks your spelling and grammar but most of the style options are available on your profile page (/wp-admin/profile.php).

Here is a summary of the options:

• Bias language may offend or alienate different groups of readers.
• Clichés are overused phrases with little reader impact.
• Complex phrases are words or phrases with simpler every-day alternatives.
• A double negative is one negative phrase followed by another. The negatives cancel each other out, making the meaning hard to understand.
• A hidden verb is a verb made into a noun. These often need extra verbs to make sense.
• Jargon phrases are foreign words and phrases that only make sense to certain people.
• Passive voice obscures or omits the sentence subject. Frequent use of passive voice makes your writing hard to understand.
• Phrases to avoid are wishy-washy or indecisive phrases.
• Redundant phrases can be shortened by removing an unneeded word.

These settings follow the user so each user on your blog can have different settings.

Also the AtD plugin code has been updated to the WordPress coding standards, much cleaner.  The TinyMCE plugin has experienced a rigorous overhaul as well.  If you have any issues, let me know.

— Raphael

(Update 4 Sept 09 – 10am) well, for those of you who had issues, thanks for letting me know. 🙂 One of the AtD files had whitespace at the end causing WordPress to die with a “Cannot modify header information” warning.  To make this especially maddening, it only affects those who have output_buffering disabled in php.ini which is dependent on who packaged PHP and/or how it was installed.   The issue has been resolved and the latest is in the WordPress repository.