I tried a sentence at PolishMyWriting.com. The sentence was: "Onec upon at time, there was a potato." It found my misspell, but it:

  1) Didn't capitalize the correction suggestions.
  2) Ate the space between 'once' and 'upon' upon correction.

And now that I've given it this reply to proof, it doesn't find the misspelling inside the double quotes. Is that intended?

Also, it thinks every first word in 'single quotes' is misspelled.

Quotes are tricky to deal with. I'll note this as a bug and fix it. I'm sure you can imagine NLP isn't trivial and without "launching" there was only so much I'd catch on my own. Will get on these issues though!

I know whats causing the space eating issue. Will get it fixed.

I pasted in a few pages of my writing from one of my sites into your http://polishmywriting.com and clicked "Polish."

It didn't appear to do anything.

Apparently it didn't find anything wrong with any page except one that contained the word "infuriating", which it felt was spelled incorrectly. I think that's irony. Also, Oxford disagrees: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/infuriate?view=uk

So back to the first point, if you don't find anything wrong with my text after processing it, I'd recommend putting up a note like "Looks good to me" or some sort of indicator that something happened rather than the button just being broken.

Hi,

Looks really good. I have recommended www.polishmywriting.com to my team before. We would probably be interested in integrating this in our ROR app, as we do a lot of writing. I just put it up on my blog and it does the trick. It did freeze up when I clicked on explain a passive voice (Safari 4).

20$ a month for 5 users is ok if all 5 users are intensive users; but, for example, our blog has two regular users and then 2-3 people who blog twice a month. So, what I am trying to say is the pricing structure might need to be tweaked.

Otherwise, keep up the good work. How about a French version? Antidote has great software, but no web version.

Cheers,

Jonathan

Hi Jonathan, Thanks for your thoughts. If you'd like to discuss integration email me, raffi@dashnine.org.

I'll have to try out Safari 4 and see what happens. I agree the price structure is a bit of a wag. I'm really trying to leave it open for those who embed After the Deadline in apps and want to let people go get their own API key.

Keep in mind similar style checking tech costs $130-160. The users thing is really just an abstraction on a requests/month model. When I have data about how much people use the service I'll build in some limits to prevent abuse.

Interesting!

A few days ago I blogged how I wished that my readers could copy edit my posts:

  http://overstimulate.com/articles/readers-as-copy-editors

I'll try this out. (I was debating prototyping a "copy edit" feature by hacking my Disqus widget to post changes as comments to a hidden thread)

Pedantic (but so's your product): The caret that indicates an insertion goes underneath the baseline of the text, not above it.

http://www.colorado.edu/Publications/styleguide/symbols.html

I don't have an actual blog to test it, but I truly like the idea.

One question though, are you planing to support hosted blogging platforms like Blogger? I think that could drastically expand the circle of your potential customers.

My plan:

1. Attack a hard problem. 2. ... 3. Profit!

Once I refine and prove this technology, I expect it will open the doors to bigger things like integration with hosted platforms that want to differentiate themselves.

I added it to a WP blog, but don't have anywhere in the admin area to add the API key (except hard-coded). I tried "plugins.php?page=atd-key-config", but got "Cannot load atd-key-config."

Thats not good. What version of Wordpress are you using? The process should be simple, i.e. after you active the plugin it shows a notice saying "hey enter your API key" at the top of every admin page until you do it.

I just upgraded and testing the process with 2.7.1 (I know 2.7) works and everything is going fine on my end. I think maybe you're using an older version of Wordpress--I'll be glad to support it if there is enough demand.

I liked the cliche explanation. I don't do all that much writing, but I might run some of my homework through this before turning it in.

This is a startup? How?

:) Either you're asking this because I look more established than I am or you're asking because it looks really trivial. I find both of these extremes hard to believe. Whats on your mind?

Because it is just beginning to exist.

Edit: BTW, love your blog