14 DAY TRIAL // Automattic, the company behind the popular, blog-hosting platform WordPress.com, has just announced it acquired the spelling plug-in maker After The Deadline, one of the most powerful spell-checking technologies available, to bring advanced spelling, grammar and style checking to the blogs hosted on WordPress.com. The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. but both its creator, Raphael Mudge, and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg are very pleased with the move.
“When I first tried After the Deadline I was blown away; it was so much better than other checkers I’d used, and it was by one guy building this thing that solves a problem other folks have teams of PhDs trying to solve. I reached out to Raphael (the one guy) to see how we could get this technology in front of WordPress users and ended up doing a deal for Automattic to buy his entire company,” Matt Mullenweg wrote on the official WordPress.com blog.
Mudge started working on the application last year and began to get some promising results and attention earlier this year. A comment made by him showing the app uncovering a mistake in a New York Times article grabbed the attention of WordPress' founder and he ended up buying the startup in July.
Now, after a couple of months of rewriting the plug-in and adapting it to WordPress.com's infrastructure, the technology is already enabled for all 7.5 million English blogs on the hosting platform. The plug-in checks for spelling, grammar and style errors and offers suggestions and explanations on any of them. What sets it apart, though, is that its corrections are on par with, if not better than, those on Microsoft Word.
However, both entrepreneurs are big believers in open source technology and the plug-in will remain free to use for non-commercial purposes. There are also plans to expand the technology to include several other languages and, at a later point, also to open source the engine and the rules that are used behind the scenes.