WordPress Maker Acquires a Better Spell Checking Tool

Users of WordPress hosted blogs (WordPress.com) received a new spell checking tool today, by way of parent company Automattic’s acquisition of After the Deadline, a tool that is “so much better than other checkers I’d used,” says Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg.

The features of After the Deadline – and now WordPress – are explained well in the video below, but like other recent Automattic acquisitions (PollDaddy, IntenseDebate, Gravatar), this seems to be all about taking a third-party blogging tool and giving it the scale to become far better than it could be on its own.

In the case of After the Deadline, this means “the technology is learning from millions of blog posts on WP.com to make the contextual parts of the checker smarter and smarter,” says Mullenweg. In other words, now that it’s part of every WordPress blog, After the Deadline is going to get much smarter, much faster, which should be good for everyone that uses it. That includes self-hosted WordPress blogs (WordPress.org) too, which can get After the Deadline by installing this plugin.

To learn more about After the Deadline and WordPress.com’s new spell checker, watch this demo:

Reviews: Gravatar, WordPress

Tags: blogging, Wordpress