After the Deadline

So many things to announce, how do I do it in one blog post? Let’s do a list. Drum role roll please.

5. Good-bye API keys

We’ve gotten rid of the AtD API keys. I was pushing to ask for more information and force folks to download a white paper before getting anything. Needless to say, I lost that battle. Using After the Deadline no longer requires registering with us. It’s still free for personal use. If you have a commercial need, grab our open source software.

4. Open Source Software – Updated Release

Finally, after all this time, After the Deadline’s server software is in a public subversion repository. We’ve also repackaged the current code and updated some of the documentation. Now you can check out the server software and stay in sync with what we’re using. We also have a mechanism (a local.sl file) where you can make local changes and not worry about us breaking them during future updates.

3. AtD speaks multiple languages

Yes, now AtD speaks multiple languages. We’ve put servers in place for French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. We have more languages ready to go and we’ll make those available in the future. We’re providing contextual spell checking for these languages. French and German have grammar checking courtesy of the excellent Language Tool project. Misused word detection is under development.

The AtD Language Pack on our open source server page has everything you need.

2. bbPress Plugin Update

As if some otherworldly power was driving him, Gautam released an update to AtD/bbPress with support for French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish on Friday. How he knew about all this stuff before us, I don’t know 🙂 But it’s great and if you use bbPress you need to get the plugin.

1. WordPress Plugin Update with Translations

And yes, our WordPress plugin has been updated to banish the API key nag-screen and to support proofreading in French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

The updated WordPress plugin uses your WPLANG setting to decide which language it should proofread in. If you blog in many languages or this setting doesn’t work for you, visit your profile page (the same place where all the AtD settings are) and enable the proofread with detected language option. With this turned on, After the Deadline will detect your language and apply the correct proofreader to it.

Thanks to the wonderful WordPress community volunteers, the AtD plugin has translations for Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese, French, Finnish, Bosnian, and Persian.

0. An Extra Bonus

I originally wanted to provide 10 exciting news items and this post became way too long with too much stuff at the top. So now you get a bonus item. We’ve also released updates to the AtD front-end components. They’re L10n ready and AtD/jQuery is now compatible with jQuery 1.4.