OStatic

If your blogging platform of choice is WordPress, then you've no doubt noticed recent improvements to the way it catches spelling, style, and grammatical errors. That's thanks to acquisition of After the Deadline, a language checking software package designed for WordPress and TinyMCE.

The plugin's creator, Raphael Mudge, announced today that he has released the source code for After the Deadline (AtD) under the GNU General Public License. We?re also announcing a jQuery API for After the Deadline. Now you can add an AtD check to a DIV or TEXTAREA with little effort, writes Mudge. This is the same API that powers the Intense Debate plugin I wrote about recently.

Pidgin is a great GTK2-based instant messenger application that supports a bevy of protocols, including ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, and AIM. It's a terrific app in its own right, but when you add some of these power tools, Pidgin is even better.

pidgin-hotkeys - Use this plugin to assign global hotkeys to quickly perform regular tasks like fetching messages, toggling the buddy list, or opening the preferences pane. Also available in German and Swedish.

Even if you're not dressing up in costume this Halloween, you can still get in the spirit of the holiday. Trick out your computer with some creepy skins and plugins or treat yourself to a few ghoulish movies and desktop themes.

KDE-Look has plenty of scary, silly, and spooky Halloween themes for your desktop. Choose from a variety of pumpkins, skulls, ghosts, and even a Trick or Treating Pacman.

If you use WordPress then you know what a great blogging platform it is right out of the box. It does everything a blogger could want and more, but hundreds of industrious users have come up with plugins to make it even better. Here are just five of the over 6,800 different plugins the WordPress community has dreamed up. (Disclosure: Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

IntenseDebate - Add a ton of increased functionality to your comments with this handy plugin. Create an IntenseDebate account, install the plugin on your blog, then sync the two systems. You can moderate and reply to IntenseDebate comments right from the Admin panel, and make use of extra features like avatars, reputation points, and more. IntenseDebate also syncs all your trackback and pingback data for easy reference and linkjuice.

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past year, you know that microblogging is all the rage. Web sites like Twitter, Identi.ca, and Laconica are incredibly popular for exchanging snippets of information, chatting with others, and quickly sharing links to interesting online content. It's really a pain to jump from site to site to read your friends updates or provide your own, so here are five microblogging extensions for Firefox to help you out.

ShortenURL - Microbloggers don't want to waste precious characters on long URLs so it's customary to shorten links you display in status updates. Pasting a Web site location into URL shortening service homepage is so last week now that you can do it right from your browser's toolbar. ShortenURL makes quick work of this repetitive task by letting you crop Web addresses right from the toolbar. It supports over 100 URL shortening services already but if that's not enough, you can request more.

Apple's open source browser Safari doesn't always get the love it deserves. That's probably because in its original state, Safari isn't as inviting as Mozilla's Firefox browser with all its native bells and whistles. Nevertheless, Safari has a cadre of loyal fans.

Productivity is the buzzword these days so if your browser of choice can't help you power through your to-do list each day, then it's not very useful. If you've been lukewarm over Safari because you think using it will impede your workflow, then try these handy productivity add-ons before giving up on the Apple browser altogether.

Many people are surprised to find that with all the writing I do, hardly any is done with a traditional word processing application. Between smart quotes, file extension quirks, and publications and websites having slightly different formatting requirements, I find it's quicker and easier to use a text editor.

The two computers I use most run Linux -- the laptop runs Ubuntu, while the desktop is a distribution nomad that changes frequently. One great thing about Linux is that the platform has no shortage of capable text editors. Some lend themselves more to writing code and heavy-duty programming than others (such as Vim and Emacs) while others straddle the plain text document/programming editor line.

Lately, primarily because I've been slow to install my usual cross-over text editor of choice, Geany, I took a closer look at the plugins available for GNOME's came with the desktop editor, Gedit. The default plugins (and those found in the extra packages) make the plain vanilla editor far more appealing and useful for hardcore writers and casual programmers alike.

The Moonlight team has announced that the first beta release of Moonlight 1.0 is nearly ready for testing. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight product.

The project hopes to get new contributors to come aboard as it finalizes the 1.0 release and pushes forward to Moonlight 2.0. Developer Chris Toshok points to some of the upcoming development tasks, and says that because the 2.0 release will be larger and features numerous self-contained subsystems, developers have more opportunity to make a solid impact on the project.

If you're intrigued by what you've heard about open source applications and want to see for yourself what the fuss is about, you might be concerned about getting in over your head or doing irreparable harm to your computer. While that fear is understandable, there are some ways to safely experiment with open source apps, without putting your system in danger. Once you get your feet wet, you'll wonder what you were ever worried about.