Trying out “After the deadline”

Trying out WordPress’s “After the Deadline” spell/grammar/style checker.

Before:

I new someone what couldnt spell and who’s weblogs was avoided like the plague by shysters.

After:

I knew someone what couldnt spell and who’s weblogs shysters avoided assiduously.

Things it got right:

• “new” for “knew,” even though “new” is properly spelled
• found a passive (though passives aren’t bad, of course; dull writing is bad)
• found a cliche, “like the plague” (which I hand-edited to “assiduously”)

Things it missed:

• informal “what” introducing a dependent clause (not a real problem for me)
• misspelled “couldnt” for “couldn’t”
• misspelled “who’s” for “whose”
• improperly suggested that “shysters” was misspelled
• did not flag “shyster” as biased language

Still, it could be a useful tool if utilized correct used correctly you use it well.

(Note: you have to turn on proofreading options under your profile. You can decide to uncheck the passive voice nagger, for example).

(Second note: you’ll have to guess what AtD thought “nagger” was the misspelling of.)

Moving to WordPress.com: six easy steps

I got tired of baking my own bread, or better, perhaps, emptying my own garbage, so I’ve moved my weblog to WordPress.com (where you are right now). Please update your links, RSS feeds, etc.

Here’s how to move a self-hosted WordPress weblog to WordPress.com, by exporting to XML and reimporting at WordPress.com. Depending on the version of WordPress software you are running, these instructions might have to be adjusted. Just look around: the right button or link is somewhere to be found.

1. Go to WordPress.com and sign up for a weblog, or create a new one if you already have one there.
2. Go to the Administration Panel of your current weblog. Delete all of your spam comments. If you have had your weblog for a while, you might have a lot.
   Go to “Comments”  (not “My Comments”), Look for the “Spam” link. If you’re comfortable deleting all the comments marked as spam, Press the “Delete all Spam” link.
3. Go to the Adminstration Panel of your current weblog, and export your weblog.
   Go to “Tools/Export”. You might need to set an author. Press the “Download Export File” button. This will save a file called “wordpress-something-mumble.xml” or something like that to your local machine.
4. Go to WordPress.com Administration Panel and import the data. Note: this doesn’t import images, just “your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.”
5. Explore setting themes, etc., creating an about page, etc.
6. Put a weblog post at your old weblog pointing to your new weblog. There’s magjick that you can incant to make some things redirect automatically, but this seems like a reasonable thing to do.

It’s pretty easy to do, really; but, for some reason, I haven’t seen a very good write-up. I hope this is helpful. If it is, let me know! If not, or you have corrections, let me know, too.