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.

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.

Although I own a BlackBerry and I am writing this blog post, I am not writing this blog post on a BlackBerry. I could if I wanted to, though, thanks to the new public beta launch of the WordPress BlackBerry client.

A TypePad blogging client for BlackBerry already exists, but so far there hasn't been anything for WordPress users and, of course, nothing open source. Naturally, I was thrilled to take this new app for a spin and, I must say, it's pretty snazzy for something still in beta.

We've done several posts on how open source skills can arm a college graduate looking for tech work, or a recently laid off worker, with powerful calling cards for finding employment. From working for commercial open source companies to working on open source-focused divisions at big companies such as Yahoo!, skills with tools such as PHP, Hadoop, and open source content management system platforms can really differentiate a tech job seeker from the pack.?

TwitterJobSearch, oDesk, Elance and many other sites are good places to look for open source work. Today, I noticed this post from Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal open source content management system (which OStatic runs on), showing very favorable employment trends for people with Drupal skills.?

Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears. Stories can be buried on sites such as Digg by abusive users with an axe to grind.

Will Novell, Dell turn to open-source M&A to grow? Novell has expressed interest in acquisitions, and Dell may have its eyes on the open source storage market.

Is the world now an open source society? Do open source and the Internet values on which it is based have a political dimension?

Getting the most out of OpenOffice.org Writer. It is, without a doubt, the most frequently used application in the OpenOffice.org suite.

Ubuntu newbie guide. Pre-installation tips, post-installation techniques, and more.

Open source usability: Joomla! vs. WordPress. A head-to-head comparison of content managers.

What Obama could learn from Mozilla. How can we focus our government on policies, not politics? Mozilla has clues.

The coming merger of netbooks and handhelds. With Android moving into netbooks, should we expect synergy between netbooks and handhelds?

Firefox 3.1: Not coming until the second quarter? TraceMonkey tests and fixes still loom. Will it ship with it?

There are a number of full featured open source content management systems out there. Content management systems (CMS) are used increasingly in lieu of more traditionally managed web pages, on various sites with diverse audiences and very different goals. They can be updated quickly, easily, and require very little (if any) knowledge of how the inner plumbing works.

There are, of course, proprietary CMS platforms. Many -- from individuals to businesses -- opt for open source alternatives. Cost is naturally a factor, but having used both closed and open CMS platforms, it's been my experience that the open alternatives offer better features, an increased ability to modify and customize easily, and behave with more consistency in different browsers than most of their closed counterparts.

Finding the right open CMS for your needs is the hardest part. But there are a few considerations and rules of thumb that can make this decision a little easier.