After the Deadline

Proofread More Languages + Good-bye API Keys

Posted in News by rsmudge on February 15, 2010

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.

8 Responses

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  1. Gautam said, on February 15, 2010 at 4:38 pm

    Lol.. regarding #2 point, I received your Google Groups mail and then checked the changes in WordPress plugin repo to make changes in bbPress plugin accordingly. 😛

    • rsmudge said, on February 15, 2010 at 4:51 pm

      I know 🙂 You just managed to get it out before I put out the WordPress plugin–something you’re welcome to continue doing in the future. I just like to poke a little fun at things.

      • Gautam said, on February 15, 2010 at 5:24 pm

        Lol, by the way I didn’t get the update notification for the WordPress plugin. Maybe shooting up the version to 0.5 would help?

      • Gautam said, on February 15, 2010 at 5:29 pm

        Oh sorry, I got it now.

      • rsmudge said, on February 15, 2010 at 5:33 pm

        Look at all this great conversation on this blog. See, everyone will see how many comments there are and know how popular it is!

        I learned my lesson the hard way about version numbers. WP uses PHP’s version compare function. This thing basically tokenizes the string by . and compares each part (from left to right). So for example 0.49003 vs 0.49003 vs. 0.5 is:

        0 <= 0 <= 0, 5 <= 49003 <= 49004

        *shrug*

  2. donnacha | WordSkill said, on February 16, 2010 at 12:22 pm

    Wonderful to read that more languages are one the way, all you need are another 127 to match WordPress.com’s 132.

    Did you realize that, between the five languages you now support, there are 1000,000,000 native speakers?

    Keep up the good work!

    • rsmudge said, on February 16, 2010 at 4:29 pm

      Thank you. My goal for this first round (we’re half-way into it) is to provide proofreading tools for 90% of WordPress.com’s userbase. I can do that with another 4-5 languages.

  3. No Keys Necessary For AtD said, on February 18, 2010 at 1:53 am

    […] powered Raphael Mudge has announced on the After The Deadline blog a couple of interesting developments the first being the removal of […]


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