Automattic the company which creates the popular blogging platform WordPress have acquired Plinky, a service which provides a prompt like a question or a challenge and asks users to type in an answer.

Plinky has been integrated into WordPress.com and will allow users to post answers to the questions or challenges to their blog along with offering integration with other social networking services like Twitter and Facebook.

Blogger’s Block basically happens when someone gets stuck for ideas and cannot write for a small period of time. With the help of Plinky users can continue to answer small questions or challenges which in turn will help them recover from a Blogger’s Block. More information on the acquisition can be found here.

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If you’re using Mozilla Firefox and you do any writing on the web then, here is an interesting and intelligent add-on for you.  After the Deadline, from Automattic,  is a fabulous add-on for Mozilla Firefox which brings smart, contextual spelling, style and grammar checking to the browser. It works on most text area’s used in HTML forms.

After the Deadline enables you to write better, tweet with correct grammar and spend less time editing. It can handle everything from common typos to misused punctuation, double negatives, redundancies and other grammatical errors.

Once you install this add-on, just click on the check icon displayed on text areas of web forms to check your grammar and spelling or right-click and select ‘Check Spelling and Grammar’ from the context menu of a text area.

You can set After the Deadline to run the proofreader automatically before submitting a form. Apart from the default grammar rules applied, some extra options like bias language, cliche, complex phrases, double negative etc., can be used to find patterns of poor writing style. You may add phrase(s) to the ignore list by typing it into the text field and clicking ‘Add’. Following is a screencast demonstrating some of the useful features of After the Deadline.

After the Deadline is also available as a plugin for WordPress, RoundCube, bbPress and PHPList.

Download After the Deadline for Firefox

You might also want to check out how After the Deadline tries to make spelling suggestions.