Wikidot would be nothing without The Users and The Community. We appreciate every part of the co-operation, i.e. community-based HOWTOs and FAQ, partnership in promoting Wikidot etc.

Today we would like to present a beautiful example of users' engagement in Wikidot's life — Wikidot Video Tutorial. One of our users: samoore created couple of videos in which he describes how to start work with Wikidot step-by-step. This is a very useful guide especially for those who have just created an account and/or new wiki site.

Summer holiday is over and for some of you it is time to get back to school. This also means new tasks, new classes and new goals to achieve. You might wonder what Wikidot has to do with this? In fact, using Wikidot to support your classes is a great idea, and we will shortly tell you why.

We are also preparing a special offer for school, college and university teachers and lecturers. If you are a teacher or lecturer and decide to use Wikidot for your classes, let us know. If you need more functionality for the education purposes, we will be happy i.e. to increase the storage for your uploaded files, increase number of wikis you can create and help you organize your work.

More about Wikidot in Education can be found on a special page.

today we've upgraded the authenticating system on Wikidot. This enhances the security level and fixes some bugs that appeared when using Internet Explorer (and Safari) and wikis on custom domains (i.e. not in the .wikidot.com domain).

We have also decided to improve the log-in system — from now on there is one single and secure login URL used for authenticating: https://www.wikidot.com/auth:login. This, together with the SSL, dramatically improves security and is especially important for people logging into domains hosted by Wikidot but from outside of the wikidot.com domain.

We hope all bugs related to Internet Explorer, cookies and custom domains are now gone. In case of any please contact our Support Team either at the dev-list, moc.todikiw|troppus#liame troppus or on the community forums.

Regards,
Your Wikidot Team

If you are unable to log-in into one of wikis on the custom domains, try the following:

1. Go to www.wikidot.com and try to log in there (link in the top right corner).
2. After you have logged in, go to the wiki at an external domain — you should be logged in automatically.
3. If unsuccessful, try deleting cookies for the custom domain and for the wikidot.com domain and try the above steps again.
4. If the above still does not work, go to the corresponding url within the wikidot.com domain for a given wiki and log in there. You can ask owner of the wiki what the right URL is.

Hopefully most people will not see the problem because it is triggered by a combination of browser versions and security settings, but it still is something that needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

We have already started working on this issue and the permanent fix for the above issue will be introduced tomorrow (12 Aug 2008).

We are sorry about any inconveniences.

Today's choice is the Almost Random Page Chooser — one of the most fresh snippets. Geek style, brilliant idea and simple code. Pure and delighful.

It's worth being seen, even if you don't want to put it on your page. So… why is it so great?

• we do not provide a "random page" feature (yet) and this is a brilliant workaround for it,
• it uses the powerful and flexible ListPages module which we recently introduced and which is getting a lot of attention and applications among the community.

The solution is placed on the snippets wiki which we have recently redesigned and refreshed. And we also encourage you to share your own interesting solutions in this wiki!

Also, we have chosen new featured wiki. F650CS FAQ is a complete FAQ about BMW F650CS motorcycle. Author did a great job since it needed a lot of work to include complete information and technical issues supported by many photos and detailed description. Good job!

Visit this wiki!

The operation was certainly non-trivial and we had been planning it for some time, but the total network outage for Wikidot was just seconds. After migrating to Lighttpd there were a few server hickups — a few icons were not working, printer-friendly view was not displayed properly and SSL was broken… but these were really minor problems and resolved quickly, within minutes. Hopefully there should be no other problems — if you encounter any, let us know!

We hope that after this upgrade Wikidot will be even more responsive, scalable and secure.

Also this week the Bloo theme has been improved to remove minor imperfections and a new variant Bloo - no side bar has been created just for members not using a side bar.

Last but not least, we would like you to welcome a new member in our team! Łukasz Tarka (Squark) is joining us as the new Community manager. He will be responsible for maintaining support, being in contact with the Community and providing help and cooperation between you, the Community, and Wikidot Developers.

You asked for more options for the ListPages module and expanded tags, we're happy to give them to you.

Improvements to tags :

• Improved tag size : each tag can be up to 64 characters. Now you can even use supercalifragalisticexpialodocious as a tag.
• You can now as many tags to a page as you want.

Improvements in ListPages module include:

• There is now 1 RSS related argument instead of three, rss. The new rss argument defines the name of the feed and creates the feed links all at once.
• Modules that use url-based parameters now can use a new special argument value, @URL which allows you to choose which parameters the module should take from the url
• The new, highly expected %%preview%% variable, that shows 200 (or any other number) first characters of page.
• The date parameter now supports expressions like last two months which will display only the pages created in the last two months.

More on the improved syntax of the module in its documentation.

We also encourage to use the new Bloo theme (extremely nice for blogging, see it live here) as we recently fixed a bug that disallowed to use ManageSite module with it. We will be including more blogger-friendly tools and features soon, so stay tuned!

Also, during the maintenance, some of the uploaded files may become visible with a delay — we will be syncing files progressively and this might affect all wikis.

No outage is expected and the Wikidot.com will be available on-line all the time. Also, we will post updates about the progress.

Thanks,
The Wikidot Team

[UPDATE] we had to spend extra few hours yesterday to find an optimal and long-term solution for the upgrade and hopefully we have found a perfect solution. We will implement it today within a 5-10min break (Wikidot will be off-line) between 10.30AM and 11.30AM UTC.

[UPDATE2] During 12min break we have successfully upgraded internal storage for wiki content and made some internal changes. All file uploads should work fine now.

Due to popular demand we've added two highly requested new AdSense unit placements: floating left and floating right.

If you do not want to use any of the predefined locations, you can easily put AdSense units in your wiki pages using our new template system. You can create an ad unit with "Custom label for manual placement" and simply put it into a _template page for a given category. This will allow you to include and change custom ad placements across an entire category instead of page by page. If you are unfamiliar with templates, you can find more details on the templates documentation page.

The ListPages module is getting more and more popular and people have started using it in many different and interesting ways: blogging, news pages, even issue trackers. We are getting a lot of positive feedback about it.

Following your suggestions, we have added a new "magical tag" that allows you to select pages with similar tags as the current page. Simply include the wiki syntax below in any page and you will get a list of pages that share tags with the page the module is placed in.

 + Similar pages [[module ListPages tags="="]] 

Of course you can add other options to customize page selection or formatting — see the ListPages module documentation for more details.

The last thing we wanted to mention is… you can now comment on documentation pages!. We enabled comments in our documentation, weeks ago to give you another way to tell us what were doing right — and what we're doing wrong. The comments section is also a great way to point out errors in the documentation so that they can be fixed quickly.

Good luck!

The Wikidot Team

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Every wiki now features a special URL which contains a list of pages within a wiki to help search engines crawl and find your content easier. E.g. a sitemap for www.wikidot.com can be found at http://www.wikidot.com/sitemap.xml (note: this is an XML file, your browser might not display this correctly). Of course there are no sitemaps for private wikis — they are not public by definition.

But honestly, last week we have been fighting spam on Wikidot most of the time. About 10% of all content created on Wikidot within the last 2 years is spam (this is not that much, but could become a serious problem if left unattended). Our job is to find spam, hide it from you and discourage people from spamming. Therefore we have built a very nice automatic filter for detecting spam content and now we need to plug this to Wikidot to provide 2 kinds of functionality:

• it should help us marking some wikis as spam (those are mostly about bank credits, health insurances etc.)
• it should help wiki admins and blog authors to protect from spam (spam comments, forum posts, spam pingbacks etc.) — we will certainly need this once we introduce a real blogging platform

As an important step in discouraging spammers from starting spam wikis, every wiki marked as spam:

• blocks all web crawlers (including Google, Yahoo MSN and all others) from indexing the content (by using the robots.txt file),
• changes all external links into redirects with special rel="nofollow" attribute — such links are not visible to any web crawler.

Those certainly make creating "link farms" on Wikidot pretty useless.

Although sitemaps do not bring any new visible improvements, they will certainly improve your wikis' visibility in the Internet. Good luck to all Wikidotians!

This week we are introducing a new requested feature that adds "karma" to users' profiles. Karma, in very short words, reflects your activity at Wikidot.com. What is immediately visible is that every user icon (avatar) now has an indicator with 0 to 5 bars that reflect "karma levels" — from "none" to "guru".

You can read more about the karma system in the Karma FAQ.

The general rule is that the more you use Wikidot, the higher your karma is. We are trying to make the karma distribution both fair and motivating for the users and you can get karma for various activities, like creating content, participating in discussions, being active on community portals (like Wikidot's community wiki) and using AdSense on your wikis (this actually helps us too!!!)

Next week we will probably work on improving the AdSense functionality and developing anti-spam techniques.

We wish everyone high karma and good time using Wikidot!
The Wikidot Team

So, we have decided to create tools that would help you blog. There is a quick proposal that lists things that would constitute a useful set of blogging features. (Your are welcome to add your comments!)

We have already completed the live templates that allow one to define custom page layout for chosen categories by creating special _template pages.

Last week we have introduced the ListPages module which takes a lot of select criteria (tags, categories, dates…) and can list pages in a custom format — e.g. as a list, a blog-like summary and many others.

From now we will try to stick to the "one week - one new feature or improvement" rule which mean new stuff should be introduced every week from now. In the near future you can expect more work towards the mentioned blogging platform and a Wikidot-wide system of user karma.

Stay tuned!

The Wikidot Team

The long story is that at about 8PM (UTC) we had to reboot the main server. Last server reboot was 180 days ago and since then we were operating without any major issues. Usually rebooting would mean just a few minutes of being off-line and we were fully prepared to do this operation smoothly. Unfortunately there was a problem with starting again — the booting just hanged at one point, without any apparent reason, any message etc. The natural thing was to quickly boot the server in a "rescue mode" and trace the problem. So we did it within the next few minutes. We had a very similar situation when we were testing this server prior to making it public, but apparently the problem was different this time.

As we were suspecting that this could be easier to debug and fix locally (it could be anything, software or hardware), we asked the support team from SoftLayer.com to handle the issue — they are great at fixing such things. And they did it, but it took ~ 8 hours all together to bring the server back.

We hoped it could be fixed quicker, but we are glad it is fixed after all and the service is up, running and stable again. Fortunately it was evening/night in Europe and US and hopefully the outage was not noticed by most of our user, but for us it was a very busy night.

There is certainly one thing we have learned: we will start designing a failover/load-balance infrastructure asap. Right now we have live backups to our server in Germany (so your data is never lost) and theoretically we could make it the primary server during the outage, but the amount of traffic we are getting recently would be too much for it for sure. Shame on us that we have not looked into this before. Anyway, we will do our best to avoid such situations in the future.

Thanks for using Wikidot!

The Wikidot Team

• allowing users to upload HTML files. They are served from different domain. This is important for security reasons. The whole process of redirection is transparent for users
• fixing blank templates appearing in template list
• fixing privacy bug with FrontForum module that used to allow user to display forum threads from private sites

A Google Group has been set up as a temporary dev-list where we can talk about ways to improve Wikidot, how to fix bugs, and other such things.

Everyone is welcome to join. You can read the posts with your web browser or have them subscribed on your mailbox. This is not only a way to talk to us at Wikidot — but also a research project before implementing a new Wikidot feature — a mailing list.

Many bugs and other errors were fixed at Wikidot today. We've corrected many spelling mistakes suggested by our community. We've fixed a few configuration problems, especially the one that didn't allow you to upload files bigger than 8MB.

Sadly, we had to disable the workaround being used to IFRAME HTML and JavaScript documents into Wikidot pages. This was a security hole.

We understand how important it is to IFRAME HTML documents into your Wikidot pages. Therefore, we are now researching a way for this to work in a safe way for everyone.

There are still more bugs to fix, we're working on them! If you know of any, please report them on our Community Forum or our new Dev List.

The thing however that really is pleasing is the usage of private wikis — did you know that over 40% of all our wikis are private? And that about 30% of the users' activity is happening in non-public areas? Unfortunately we cannot have a "featured private wiki" (simply because they are not public) but certainly some of them would deserve attention.

So, what do people use private wikis for? Some of them are personal workspaces created to "keep things in one place", but most of them have been created for small workgroups, also business users, to help communication and organizing workspace and workflow. Just to mention a few areas of usage: software development, b2c communication, knowledge bases, project management etc. And it looks like Wikidot fits (almost) perfectly for the job. Although Wikidot wikis are free, many people use it for mission-critical tasks. Thanks for trusting us!

Also a very large userbase in the private realm comes from universities where wikis are used to support classes, student project and scientific work.

Private wikis (and the whole Wikidot too) is getting more and more popular and recently we have been getting a lot of requests for raising the limits of users in private wikis (each private wiki was limited to 50 users only). We usually do it without problems, but the amount of requests made the waiting queue a bit long. Today we have decided to remove the limit for all the wikis!

Good luck and have a nice wiki,
The Wikidot Team

BTW: Needless to mention, private wikis at Wikidot are still free!

What this basically means is that you can grab the software, install this and have your very own Wikidot! Would it not be great to have such a wiki farm at your work, school or university? We hope so and we encourage every wiki- enthusiast to consider this.

Join us at the (redesigned) Wikidot.org site and find more information about the software, downloads and resources.

See also the press release.

Good luck!
The Wikidot Team

So here are a few details: as some of you know, our main effort now is concentrated on Wikidot 2.0 - the "next generation" wiki framework. It rocks, believe me ;-). But while everyone is waiting for the "2.0", we already have software that powers the current service at wikidot.com that would certainly be also very useful (even if not super admin/user-friendly) if released as open source now. So what we are going to do is:

Release current Wikidot v1 as open source

We are packing, checking and cleaning as much as we can to make the initial release now. At the beginning it would be probably more like a "hackers' release" but it will give you a chance to install, customize and run the software on your own server. For free of course. Cool, isn't it?

Open the development of Wikidot v2

With Wikidot 2.0 we are close to the point where we can invite other developers to join in creating (IMHO) the most advanced open-source wiki software on Earth. Several components are already done and can be instantly useful. The most important thing it that it is fully-modular with the nice system of extensions, modules, add-ons and plugins.

How?

For both projects we will be creating a publicly-available Subversion repository with the code. We will also redesign http://wikidot.org website to be a community hub for open-source products and development.

Both products will be initially available under the GNU Affero General Public License - version 3.

We deeply believe that free and open are the right ways to think about computer software and our releases will create numbers of opportunities for users, developers and administrators on their way to "wikifying the world"

On the day of the release there will be a few other nice announcements.

Good luck!

The Wikidot Team

• infinite browser reloads (e.g. after logging in on the custom domain)
• not being able to create a new account on a custom domain

Although we have fixed this permanently we failed in one thing - we cannot fix your old cookies. Very odd. We thought we know almost everything about browsers and cookies, but none of our methods work after we spent hours on the problem.

If you experience any unusual behavior on a wiki hosted outside of the .wikidot.com domain, please clear all browser cookies associated with this domain. E.g. if I am on www.wikidot.org and it behaves strangely, I would need to remove cookies from the www.wikidot.org domain only. How you can do this depends on what browser you are using. Try googling for it or parhaps someone could post (link to) instructions for particular browsers?

Thanks for your understanding,

Michal

After months of development and tests, we are so happy to give you one more way to use Wikidot for: earning money. This is the next (but not last!) step in our process of building "the best wiki hosting ever".

Here is how it works: using our control panel you can put AdSense ads on your wiki pages. AdSense brokerage advertising program belongs to Google and you would be paid by Google when your visitors view/click ads. We are using its special feature called AdSense API that allows developers and hosting providers (such as us) to share revenue with their content creators (like you) and lets us handle most of the configuration issues for you.

If you wonder how we benefit from it, remember that AdSense API is designed as a revenue sharing system. At Wikidot we have set the sharing ratio to 80/20, which means you are getting most of the generated revenue. Additionally we get some bonuses from Google for each new user that joins AdSense program.

Why are we doing this? AdSense revenue sharing perfectly fits our long-term strategy. Instead of charging for services, we concentrate on spreading Wikidot and developing ways to support your creativity. We believe we will all benefit from it. It is worth to say that Wikidot is the one and the only wiki hosting service that shares ads revenue with its users!

We highly encourage you to try AdSense! We think it is worth trying and might surprise you how easy it is to start earning with Wikidot.

Please also note that by using AdSense on your wiki you are supporting our efforts and the Wikidot project itself! Thank you and good luck!

To learn more visit AdSense info or AdSense FAQ

There are at least two things we can celebrate: one is that meanwhile we have reached 50 000 users, the other one is that the new server is really great. Not only it is much much more reliable (we are still doing live intercontinental backups, remember?) and more powerful, but also have much much more storage.

This is why we have increased your storage limit from 100 MB to 300 MB per wiki — does any other wiki farm give you this for free? Moreover, if you need more, please email us at moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus, tell us what you need it for and why. We will be more than happy to increase this limit for you! Also please remember that we do not set any limits on number of users nor number of pages for your wikis!

And we have found a nice wiki this week: Online Symbian Encyclopedia is our new featured wiki that should make every mobile phones fan happy! If you are a Symbian developer you might want to visit it too. This wiki is really highly recommended!

Meanwhile we are working on implementing OpenSocial API that provides a standardized way of creating multi-platform web applications. As a result you will be able to use the same widgets within MySpace, Hi5, Ning or Wikidot. And there will be A LOT of such applications. You can watch our progress on the official OpenSocial Wikidot.com blog. We are proud to be one of the first wikis willing to implement the OpenSocial API.

We also have made significant progress on Wikidot 2.0 and we will be releasing first open-sourced components soon! The first one will be our universal transformation package that can (when completed) transform between various wiki markups (Wikidot, MediaWiki etc.), HTML documents, PDFs etc. Excited? Well, you should be ;-)

• software upgrades after moving the server to a new datacenter
• fixed avatar uploads, [[gallery]] items and MIME types for uploaded files
• fixed typographical quotes bug

If you experience any problems, please contact us at moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus or post a comment here.

We have been preparing for this move for a long time. We will post more info a bit later - please let us rest for a while ;-)

Your Wikidot Team

We are moving to USA, Dallas (TX), so it should be good news for all our users located in Americas. But we will do our best to keep everyone satisfied and I believe our setup in the new datacenter will prove to be more reliable, responsive and scalable. Not only it provides more performance, but also much more redundancy.

We have a very wise migration plan and we will do it this Saturday, 17th November sometime between 8 AM and 10 AM UTC. We will try to minimize the unavailability period to max 15 minutes. This is deep night in USA and morning in Europe. (Try a time converter utility to find the time in your zone). We have already started copying the data and on Saturday we will make the final sync and switchover.

This is the next step in building a robust, reliable, scalable and redundant infrastructure for Wikidot.com. I hope it will serve you well ;-)

BTW: There is only one thing that you have to do. If you have a "custom domain" for your wiki and you are using an A record pointing to the old IP address, you will need to change it to the new one or change to a CNAME record and point to wikidot.com. We will send emails to all admins with such domains tomorrow.

Michal Frackowiak

a short summary of other recent changes:

• new theme "Shiny" — similar to the layout of our main wiki at www.wikidot.com
• improved "Webbish" theme, old version renamed to "Webbish (old)"
• "Webbish" theme is now default for all new wikis
• we have changed the favicon for Wikidot (and effectively for all hosted wikis)

If you like the look of our homepage you can easily apply it to your wiki! The new theme is called "Shiny" and you can enable it by going to Site Manager » Appearance » Themes on your wikis.

We have also polished the well-known Webbish theme and set it as the default theme for all new sites. If you have been using the Webbish theme — we have renamed it to Webbish (old), so you might want to upgrade to the new Webbish (current) to refresh your layout a bit.

If you happen to have a break — we highly recommend The Coffeetime Wiki, a great resource for any coffee enthusiast. After exploring this Wiki we are tempted to try roasting coffee ourselves!

First of all, we decided to change the front page layout. It is designed to be clearer and more modern than the old one. Many thanks to Gabrys (Piotr Gabryjeluk) for the great design!

By the time we were working on it, we also introduced a new feature that can be easily added to any of your wikis. It is a tabview element that lets you organize content in nice-looking tabs. When combined with the new advanced table, it opens a lot new of ways to organize layouts.

And, as an effort to present interesting wikis, we have chosen a new featured wiki! If you are interested in Heroes — a popular TV series by NBC, be sure to have a look at heroes.wikidot.com.

As you might expect, this is not enough for us! We are still working on more fantastic features and the long-awaited open source edition of Wikidot.

To summarize our backup and data storage policy:

• we use redundant disks on the main servers — nothing happens if a disk fails
• hot-backup database server with redundant disks — data is not lost when main server fails
• backup of uploaded files every 2 hours
• full backup to a server in a different datacenter every few days
• backups of individual sites are available for download via Site Manager » backup

We are also struggling to provide the highest availability possible. In fact during 1 year operation we have experienced about 22 h outage all together, from which 18 hours were caused by our hosting provider. This makes about 99.7% availability (it would be 99.95% if you exclude network problems in the datacenter) which is not bad after all, however we have plans to improve this dramatically, by 1. moving to another datacenter, 2. building a high-availability cluster with redundant servers.

More details later, I need some rest now. I will tell you then about our new backup system and explain, why your data is 100% safe at Wikidot.com

- Michal

Mac users - join us!

The NoOOXML.org site, or noooxml.wikidot.com, has already gotten 24,500 people to sign a petition against Microsoft's OOXML proposed standard.

read more...

• improved Login dialog interface — enter and tab work much better
• cross-domain sessions — previously: if you were using custom domains for you site you had to login independently in each of the domains. now: login once at ANY of our wikis and we will recognize your session wherever you go within the Wikidot project, including custom domains
• browsers can now remember and auto-fill your login/password. Firefox does the its job perfectly, other browsers might still have some issue.
• fixed string handling (escaping) with searching modules - a minor bug
• removed the paranoid SSL from the secure access options — the existing SSL access is secure enough and much much simpler.