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 ;-)

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

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

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...

Recently a new comedy series has hit the web: Where are the Joneses.

The synopsis is that Dawn (left) has found out that she is the child of sperm donor and she now has the list of the other 27 siblings who are scattered across Europe. After contacting her new found brother Ian (Right) they begin the search with Jonti, the director filming their journey.

Besides being a funny (and interactive) show it is also a large marketing experiment sponsored by Ford that utilizes various web services and projects to deliver and process content. As the actors travel through Europe they write a blog that is a central "hub" for all the content. When new videos are available you can watch them on YouTube, photos are hosted on Flickr. They also use Twitter, MyBlogLog and many other web tools.

One of the coolest things is that the whole project is interactive. Not only you can comment on the content but also you could influence the storyline and work on screenplay. So if Joneses are going to visit you city, you might actually make them visit your favorite (or most hated) places ;-) This part of the project is hosted at wherearethejoneses.wikidot.com (did you know you can make such beautiful wikis with Wikidot?)

We are very happy being a part of the project. Although it is just spinning up we give them thumbs up! Good job!

Other links: a blog post by zeroinfluencer about the project.

Recently we have introduced a few minor changes at Wikidot. The most important one is the possibility to delete a wiki from within the Site Manager. In fact we were getting a lot of emails like "please delete my site" or "I have misspelled the url, please change it" etc.

Right now you can delete or change the URL of your wiki yourself — the options are available at the bottom of the Site Manager list under Extreme actions.

The good thing is that "delete" comes with "restore" so that even if you delete a wiki accidentally nothing is lost. In the future we will also improve deleting wiki pages and forum threads/messages. Don't you think that nothing is lost could be a nice tagline for wikidot? ;-)

In June we have also simplified the whole process of creating a Wikidot account and the process of starting a new wiki. Now to start a new wiki you just need to fill one simple form.

Apart from fixing small bugs and adding improvements we are working really really hard on giving you the best ways to earn some money on your wikis. We are also working on improving the support response times and our activity in the community. We will keep you informed about the progress!!!

good luck!
michal

Big thanks to these who actively use Wikidot, invite new people and tell others about Wikidot! And a big "HI!" to all new users who join us.

I can promise that Wikidot will get better and better with time. There are a few new features waiting that you will most certainly like, few improvements and great ideas how to make Wikidot a general collaboration and publishing platform. The best things are yet to come! Stay with us ;-)

In the early days of Wikidot the business model assumed that users will be allowed to create free Wikis but in exchange they will have to allow displaying some advertisements that would benefit us directly, not the authors. They would also have an option to pay some amount of $$ to get rid of ads.

But then we thought: no way. This is not how it should work. Although this is exactly what our wiki-competitors do, we do not like this model any more. Perhaps it is just time to be different from everybody else is doing. So a few weeks ago I have removed all the parts of Terms of Use and FAQ that mentioned ads and the lack of ads is also mentioned at the Features section.

So… your wikis will remain free and clean (from ads) as they are now.

There are some more things coming soon and I promise you that you will love it. They are the reason it has been a bit quiet here recently.

good luck! - michal

It seems that the upgrade solved at least a few problems. Most important one is the "blank alert box" when previewing or saving long pages. Hopefully you will not see this one again.

Although a lot of testing have been done before and after the upgrade there might be some not-so-obvious problems left. The fastest way to report them is to send an email to moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus.

Thanks to the open-source developers and contributors of Apache Web Server and PHP for providing their high-quality software!

regards
michal frackowiak

Thank you all for using Wikidot, telling your friends about Wikidot or writing about Wikidot!

I realize Wikidot is neither MySpace.com nor Blogger.com with millions of users but it still makes a nice milestone in the growth of Wikidot. And a certain indication that Wikidot is going (or will soon go) mainstream.

So how large is Wikidot now anyway? You can see some stats on the main page but just to summarize where we are now:

• all users: 10 098
• all wikis: 4 584
• all pages: 114 039
• all page revisions (edits): 315 432
• average new users per day in February: 103
• average page edits per day in February: 2 743
• unique visitors in January: 130 000
• total page views in January: 1 600 000 (!!!)
• average daily visitors in February: 9 800
• average daily page views in February: 63 000
• current rank for Google search free wiki: 6 (!!!)
• current rank for Google search wiki hosting: 8 (!!!)

I think this is not that bad ;-) Other statistics are also very promising so to all of you who ask "How can I be sure Wikidot will not go offline some day?" I can firmly say: "Not a chance. We are going mainstream!"

Improvements have been introduced on a few levels, from the PHP application itself (more caching) to the database structure. Results? Even under high stress during high traffic hours the server uses only ~3-5% of its cpu/disk resources. It seems that there is a lot of spare power now ;-)

To apply the changes the server had to be taken down for 28 minutes. It was the first downtime that long caused by maintenance since the Wikidot launched. So far the server has been working non-stop without a single reboot for the last 6 months.

Many thanks to developers of Memcached, PostgreSQL and many others for high-quality professional open source software!

Anyway — from now on you configure any of the pages within your Wiki as your identifier when logging into an OpenID-enabled service. Wikidot.com does not (yet) offer OpenID server capabilities but you can easily configure a delegation from Wikidot to any of the OpenID identity providers, e.g. MyOpenID, LiveJournal, GetOpenID.com. So it works like this:

• I have a wiki at http://michal.wikidot.com and an OpenID account at http://myopenid.com (to be exact: http://michal.frackowiak.myopenid.com).
• Since Wikidot does not offer a true OpenID server but I want to use michal.wikidot.com as my public URL identifier, I configure a delegation (at Site Manager » OpenID) to michal.frackowiak.myopenid.com
• anytime I am using an OpenID-enabled service I log in as michal.wikidot.com, but the service forwards me to MyOpenID to authorize.
• this way I am using a cool Wiki URL instead of the generic one from MyOpenID ;-)

Read more at http://openid.net. Some people say that 2007 will be the year of OpenID. There are not that many OpenID-enabled services but it certainly becomes more and more trendy to use it.

Using an OpenID system you can:

• start an account at Zooomr (http://beta.zooomr.com)
• leave comments at LiveJournal (http://livejournal.com)
• log in into WikiTravel (http://www.wikitravel.com)
• and perhaps many more services (some listed here)

SSL access via HTTPS://…

If you have a private site and do care about the security — you might find it VERY useful.

At the moment this feature is just for testing and is intended to be a premium feature with a monthly (small) fee. I hope you will enjoy it! I would strongly advise it for any private (non-public) Wiki!

You can configure secure access in your Site Manager under Secure access (SSL/TLS). Some explanations are there too.

• they let you create a panel that holds widgets,
• you can configure individual widgets from their gallery of widgets,
• now you can simply embed the whole panel into your pages.

This is very cool and easy to embed widgets into your side bar (nav:side) or main content of your page. There is also an example in our "Snippets Wiki".

So far it seems the easiest way to include widgets into Wikidot pages and the choice of available widgets is already great and is growing nicely.

I would like to state at this point, that the data stored on the server (your data) is as safe as I can make it — the server used redundant disks for storage and the backup is done every day and sent to a different backup server. You can also make backups of individual sites — the option is available in your Site Manager panel.

Somehow the beginning of 2007 was/is unlucky for many services and blogs: Mashable, Center Networks, Wykop.pl ("Polish Digg"), TechCrunch and perhaps many, many others ;-) Is it a "New Year Downtime" effect?

Anyway, availability and reliability are VERY important factors when you host other peoples' pages so I hope Wikidot will be moving to a new datacenter and more capable/reliable servers soon ;-)

michal

The newsletter is available for viewing on-line and has been sent via email to these who opted for it.

Max number of members for private wikis is now 50

Previously the max was 10 but I have found many people asking to increase this number for their Wikis. So - there is a new limit. If you find this is still not enough for you - just write to moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus.

Commercial usage — now without applying!

I have found many users asking if they could use Wikidot for somehow commercial activities. Well, now you can use your Wiki for whatever commercial activity you want! The Terms of Service have been changed accordingly. So you can have your b2b, b2c or any other kind of space at Wikidot. Just make sure you are able to accept advertisements on Wikidot when they finally arrive or pay some (small) fee to get rid of them when the time comes.

happy wikidotting!

Michal Frackowiak

If the trend (based on the Alexa reach factor for Wikidot, this also matches the server statistics) remains stable I hope that Wikidot will become quite an important part of the Web! At the moment the daily Alexa rank oscillates around 30 000th position so Wikidot is clearly on its way to popularity. Thank you all for using Wikidot because YOU make it what it is!

Now, back to work — making Wikidot better.

• Instacalc — a nice calculator, quite advanced! (example)
• Labpixies gadgets, some examples are here
• and finally all of the Google Gadgets — tons of mini-applications, we have an example here!

The Google Gadgets are essentially the same as these you can use with their Google Homepage service so it is quite cool!

Happy wikiing!!!

michal

I have also decided to concentrate (almost) all efforts on finishing the editor so please do not expect any other extra features within the next month or two (apart from bugfixes of course).

As a base and engine for the new editor I have chosen one of the best available editors: TinyMCE, but with lots of extensions and totally redesigned interface.

What can you expect from the editor? It will do everything you can do with the pure wiki syntax now (basic formatting, including images, tables, links etc., also inserting modules) + draft auto-saving every minute (no more lost content!) + multi-language spellchecker.

I will post screenshots as soon as I make them. I deeply believe the new editing mode will leverage the Wiki experience to the higher level.

The next direct developments will be a modular authentication mechanism + OpenID server for users (should be quick) and the direct work on the open source code release.

hapy wikiing!!!

michal