Raffi's Blog <3

This is a test.

Dashnine Media

This is a test.

Dashnine Media

this iss a test and now it goes livve.

Dashnine Media

After the Deadline made the move to new servers last week and so far everything has gone smoothly.  Several of you reported an issue where your new key wasn’t validating.  I put a small hack into the server to validate all keys until I could look at it with more depth.  And now, I know the problem.  The webserver wasn’t able to save accounts due to a configuration issue.  My fault!

How does this affect you?

If you made an account since Friday afternoon, you’ll need to reregister it at some point.  This won’t affect you until you try to validate your key and WordPress complains that the key is not valid.  My apologies for this.

After the Deadline

Last week was a busy week.  I spent a lot of time winning new friends to After the Deadline.  The response has been positive so far.  In between that, I also fixed some bugs, created a few new ones, and fixed those too.  Here are the updates from this week:

Rule Updates

This week was more about tweaking the rule base.   I’ve added determiner agreement rules for “there’s” to reflect the existing rules for there are and there is.  I  added a rule for its vs. it’s which caught several errors in the Wikipedia simple corpus I test with.  I also added a few redundant expressions (“innovative new”) and updated some complex expressions.

Buzz

A few bloggers have written up their impressions of After the Deadline this past week:

• http://networking.seadvd.com/after-the-deadline-polishes-your-writing-online/
• http://www.barrysbestblog.com/2009/06/after-deadline-improve-your-writing.html
• http://kjctech.net/Blog/archive/2009/06/16/web-application-that-helps-blog-better.aspx
• http://buildanichestoreblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/wordpress-grammer-spelling-style-missed.html
• http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/06/16/after-the-deadline-polishes-your-writing-online/

At first I was surprised to see write ups and traffic but few referrers in my server logs.  It looks like many are linking to www.polishmywriting.com and to the WordPress plugin repository directly.  No problem.  I appreciate the love for After the Deadline.  If you use AtD be sure to share it with your community.

After the Deadline

I don’t normally blog bug fixes but this one is important.  I had a few emails today that After the Deadline was not working in Internet Explorer on WordPress 2.8.  To those of you who contacted me, Thank you so much!

Yesterday, I made a change to After the Deadline and it led to a syntax error in the Javascript plugin for TinyMCE.  For some reason, Firefox chose not to flag this.  The change was so small, I didn’t test it in other browsers.  Let this be a lesson to me.

The next time you try to make a post you’ll see everything is working as expected.  I host the After the Deadline TinyMCE plugin on my server to let you benefit from bug fixes immediately.

After the Deadline

Wow, this guy knows exactly what startup life is like!

Dashnine Media

I had to update the WordPress plugin for After the Deadline this morning.  Don’t worry, it’s not a security issue or anything crazy.

Visit http://www.afterthedeadline.com/download.slp?platform=Wordpress to get the latest.

I discovered that the AtD Plugin was leaving its markup tags in published HTML.  I noted in my FAQ I consider this kind of behavior a bug. In short–I fixed this and you’ll want to upgrade your AtD plugin to take advantage of it.  To understand more, read on.

AtD hooks into the TinyMCE editor used by WordPress.  I use the “get editor contents” event as an excuse to strip the AtD markup.  One problem with this is when WordPress does its auto-save, the editor contents is grabbed, and the markup is stripped while you’re editing.  FYI–I checked and the built-in spellchecker has this same problem.

I made a work-around awhile ago to fix this.  Unfortunately it left all that content in the editor plugin.

Today I updated the WordPress plugin to strip out the AtD markup from within WordPress (and not the editor).  This has the advantage that it saves you from the disappearing markup annoyance and if you upgrade, all the old posts with the AtD markup will automatically be corrected for you.

For those of you who don’t upgrade, you’ll experience the disappearing markup issue as I decided this was better default behavior than leaving the AtD markup in the post.  Upgrade to fix it.

After the Deadline

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted some updates on Feedback Army. After the Deadline has taken up a lot of my time lately. Don’t worry though. This wait was well worth it.

Here is the latest:

1. Your results are now private by default!  Each request generates a code that is required in the results URL.  If you want to make your results public, simply pass out the URL.  It’s as simple as that.

2. You now have the ability to reject responses and request a new one in their place.  Feedback Army responses are automatically approved after 48 hours.  Until that happens there will be a link below the response letting you reject it.  This is an experiment and we’ll see how it goes.  I think it’ll be ok.  Because I expect to spend less time QCing responses, I’ve given a raise to the workers to help cover the abuse they might suffer from trigger happy customers.  (Don’t be a trigger happy customer!)

3. And finally… this one I’m most excited about.  I’ve embedded After the Deadline into the Feedback Army response form.  Now workers have the ability to check their spelling, style, and grammar before submitting a response.  I expect this will raise the quality of writing on the site (it better, it’s the sales pitch of my main product!)  In any case this is an example of Feedback Army innovating on the back end as well as the front end.

There may be a few bugs.  I’ll address them as they come up.

Enjoy the updates!

Feedback Army

It’s been another busy week for After the Deadline.  Here are the updates:

New Application: RoundCube Webmail 

After the Deadline is now available for the RoundCube Webmail program.  This thing is a slick web-based client that can talk to any IMAP server.  I tried it with my GMail account and I am thinking of switching over to it.  Having After the Deadline available helps too.  

Since the plugin is new, it needs a patch to the RoundCube code.  Applying the patch is easy and hopefully the RoundCube team will accept my patch as it benefits other TinyMCE plugins.   Visit the Download page to get the plugin.

Rule Updates

Several new rules have made it into the grammar checker.  After the Deadline now checks for simple forms of subject-verb agreement errors:

I has to show you something.
We am far away from home.

AtD also does a better job of picking up wrong verb tenses after to such as:

I have to gone now.  (corrects to, have to be gone or have to go)

I also expanded the rules for the confused words and added more rules for incorrect tense errors.  A solid update this week.

Pricing Updates

I received several emails about the pricing.  It’s nice to know you care enough to communicate.  The confusion came over the casual use term.  I decided to do away with this and follow suit with Akismet.  After the Deadline is now free for personal use.  I don’t care if you use 100 or 1,000 requests in a month, so long as it’s you doing it.  

On the commercial side, I flattened the pricing tiers.  You can purchase 500, 1000, 2500, or 5000 requests per month for $0.01/request. Yes, a penny per request.  Imagine if Microsoft Word was that cheap!  I did this because I plan to expand After the Deadline to more applications and building pricing around how much a blogger uses AtD doesn’t make sense.  

This should clarify things.  Remember, when you buy a service plan for After the Deadline you’re investing in your craft and supporting the continued development of this technology.

Don’t Forget

I’m presenting AtD at the Ann Arbor, MI New Tech meetup this coming Tuesday.  Come out and say hi.  I know I have a few MI users out there.

After the Deadline