Automattic has acquired After The Deadline, a Wordpress plugin startup company.  After The Deadline designed a solid grammar and spelling plugin for Wordpress.  Matt Mullenweg, the chief developer of Wordpress called up Raphael Mudge, the only After The Deadline employee to find out what it would take to buy out his entire company.

The deal was made this past July and now After The Deadline was made accessible for all Wordpress.com users.  Automattic has around $30 million in funding and purchased the blo.gs pinging service from Yahoo! this past April.  Automattic also bought out PollDaddy in October and Intense Debate in September.

Blogs that run on Wordpress.com now automatically have the RSSCloud feature integrated into them. Wordpress.org users can download a plugin from here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rsscloud/.

RSSCloud is a service that adds a cloud feature to RSS feeds. As soon as an author writes a blog post or news story, an update ping is sent to a cloud server. The cloud will determine whether that post is being subscribed to. If someone is subscribing to them, then the RSS aggregator is updated. This all happens within a second. The RSSCloud protocol was made by Dave Winer, the inventor of the original RSS specification.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of Wordpress wrote about the changes on the company blog. “There’s only one reader so far (River2) that supports RSS cloud, but we expect there to be more in the future. We’re also going to be supporting other ways for people to get push notifications (Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter… who knows what else) so people will be able to find out about and visit your new blog posts as soon as possible, making blogging a more real-time experience. Since RSS Cloud is so easy to add to RSS, it seemed like a good place to start,” wrote Mullenweg

Automattic is the parent company of Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com.  Wordpress.org is an open source blogging platform and Wordpress.com is the blogging community platform.  Automattic has officially received $29.5 million in funding from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Ventures, and the New York Times [source: NYT].

Some Wordpress.org competitors include Blogger and TypePad.  Wordpress.com competitors include Xanga and LiveJournal.   Automattic raised $1.1 million two years ago as well.  Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic stated that the funding would go towards building additional services.

The New York Times Company has been using the Wordpress platform for their subsidiaries for quite some time.  About.com, a New York Times Company subsidiary is based on the Wordpress platform.  And NYT has more than 50 blogs that are powered by Wordpress as well.

Wordpress also recently gave their users on Wordpress.com a major step-up in terms of storage capacity.  Wordpress users only had 50MB up until recently, but now they 3GB each.  Matt Mullenwag, founder of Wordpress hopes that this increase in capacity will encourage their users to prdouce richer media.  Users who have paid for 1GB in the past will get 5GB instead of the free 3GB.

The announcement is also confirmed on Matt Mullenwag’s blog.

Automattic is a startup company that is best known for creating WordPress.  WordPress is an open source blogging platform that many of the major technology blogs use, including Pulse 2.0.  Matt Mullenweg of Automattic stated that he saw Gravatar evolve over the years and saw that Gravatar had great potential, but might have a problem to scale its service.  And scaling is one of Automattic’s strengths, so they acquired Gravatar. 

Over the past few days, Automattic has taken the code for Gravatar and transferred the Rails application into Wordpress.com’s infrastructure.  Gravatar now works three times as fast.  Gravatar’s Premium features will become free and also combine the number of avatars that Wordpress.com has with the avatars available on Gravatar.  Wordpress.com has about a million avatars and Gravatar has about 115,000.  Wordpress.com also made Gravatar avatars available at bigger sizes: from 80×80 to 128×128. 

Tom Werner is the creator of Gravatar.  Financial terms were undisclosed.