* Ai…, que falta me haces Clark Gable - Ravengar (Baja aqui)
FORUN
One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage
1239964078|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
For the last 2 weeks we have been excited to work on a prototype of a new, quite radical improvement to Wikidot: new homepage. This perfectly fits into the trend of making Wikidot more accessible, easier and more intuitive, that in the end also increase usability and overal user experience.
Currently a logged-in user is presented either with our default homepage which contains some general information about Wikidot + featured content, or the current my account page, which has limited customization options and, honestly, could be improved in a number of ways.
The new homepage will eventually replace the current "my account" and will bring much better overview on your sites, your activity, suggested content. It will be much easier to watch content, get new blog posts (through the RSS reader widget) and generally have much better overview on things going on at Wikidot. To make the long story short, we want the new home page THE place you start your day. Gradually we would also like to add more importance to connecting people (aka friends or connections), easier messaging, inviting, and discovering new content on Wikidot.
The screenshot above shows an example dashboard panel with widgets showing inbox messages (including invitations), Wikidot news and changelog, a mini-wiki widget, summary of AdSense earnings and a couple of external widgets from iGoogle, Widgetbox and UStream (I know the kitty is the sweetest one ;-) ). A user is able to add/remove/rearrange content freely, in a similar way you can do it on iGoogle or Netvibes. To make the new homepage and dashboard fully functional and ready we still need some work, but I guess in the end we will enjoy this new feature.
The original idea of Wikidot (from ~2 years ago) was to create a network of socially connected wikis (and people). So far we have been successfully building one of the most technically advanced wiki platform, but honestly we still lack social features that would allow higher adoption of Wikidot and more rapid growth. I guess, since Wikidot already has a very firm position in the "world of wikis", it is time to calmly look at changes that will leverage Wikidot to even higher position. The changes we will be concentrating on will mostly follow those guidelines.
Comments: 14 | category: News / Wikidot news
Follow us on Twitter, join Facebook and LinkedIn groups
1236862387|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
We have decided to do some more outreach and leverage social media to both improve communication with our users, and tell the world about Wikidot. We have created a Facebook group some time ago, today we are launching a LinkedIn group and, most important one, a Twitter account.
Follow us on Twitter
Why follow us?
- to keep up-to-date with Wikidot,
- be the first one to know about changes (if you are too lazy to follow the news or changelog),
- get an insight into the project — there are tons of stuff too small for a news or blog post
- discover interesting things about/at Wikidot — we often discover cool stuff, we will share this with you
- one more way to contact us — we will reply to every tweet you give us.
- we promise we will not flood you with spam, just the things you really want to know!
If you feel puzzled and for some reason do not know what Twitter is — it is a short messaging service that allows you to publicly post messages, statuses and updates in no more than 140 characters.
Join our Facebook group
Although not ultra-active, it is a nice one-more-way-to-get-people-together. If you have a Facebook profile, why not join the group? Let us see how far this group can evolve.
Join our LinkedIn froup
If you do have a LinkedIn profile, please join our Wikidot group. This would help us enormously by increasing our visibility in LinkedIn.
Comments: 7 | category: News / Wikidot news
Minor outage earlier today
1236186869|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Unfortunately we had a minor outage earlier today, exactly between 14.30 and 16.00 UTC. The problem was caused probably by an unexpected DOS attack that consumed resources of our main server, but we are still investigating it. We started working on this at 14.31. Although we did cope with the issue quite quickly, our freshly-rebooted storage array forced an all-disk check (fsck) which took more than an hour. Since the reboot was not scheduled, it halted the whole service from being taken on-line, and enormously prolonged the outage.
We were positing status updates in real-time.
Sorry about any inconvenience. We know people rely on Wikidot for many of their activities (we got a lot of phone-calls too), this is why we always try to prevent such incidents and fix them as soon as possible. Thanks for your understanding!
Best regards,
The Wikidot Team
Comments: 5 | category: News / Wikidot news
Testing ads on free sites
1235399982|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
This week we will be running an experiment involving placing small number of contextual ads on a free wikis. To support our servers, a lot of development time and all the growing costs it takes to provide solid and fast wiki hosting, we are looking for optimal ways to keep Wikidot as free and open as possible, and to provide service to both our free and paying subscribers. And keep everyone enjoying using Wikidot.
We will begin placing ads shortly to see if it's worth investigating or not. Ads will be kept to the minimum (we will be only showing them to a subset of non-logged users), so probably you and your regular users will not even notice them. All Pro and Educational sites will obviously not be showing ads. Also sites that use AdSense on their own will not be affected.
We dare think there is a way to keep everyone happy, including you, Wikidot users, your visitors, ad publishers and us, developers and maintainers of Wikidot. We will try to make the ad system behave much smarter than simply inserting ads in a brute-force or random way, and we still want to follow our idea of not polluting sites by ads.
The tests will finish by the end of the week and then we will decide if we want to continue displaying ads. We are open to all comments and opinions — the last thing we want is to do things that are not acceptable by our users.
We will keep you informed about the progress!
UPDATE: I think we have found a good balance for our ad system. More details are available on the advertising page.
Comments: 63 | category: News / Wikidot news
Customizable footer - one more reason to upgrade to Pro+
1235128167|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Starting today, all Pro+ users are able to freely modify footers on their sites. This feature has been requested by several of our users, most of them who run business-related and professional pages on Wikidot, and who would like to have better control over branding of their pages.
Example of an advanced custom footer on Wikidot.com
We have been using this feature internally for some time — example of custom footers can be found on www.wikidot.com — the whole large bottom bar with links is a custom footer, or at our personal blogs. As you can see, you can remove the default "Hosted by Wikidot.com" and all default links.
The option is available in the Site Manager on each of Pro+ sites, under Appearance » Custom Footer. The tool features the "Preview" function that temporarily places the footer into its place.
We believe this adds even more value to the Pro+ subscription plan, which is, just to remind, only $10 per month when prepaid yearly, for 30 sites and 20 GB storage.
Comments: 3 | category: News / Wikidot news
Pro Lite accounts, credit card payments
1234956914|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
First of all, we are happy to announce the new, entry-level yearly subscription plan Pro Lite. After listening to numerous comments about our pricing structure (thanks!) we realized that what we lack is an inexpensive, simple plan that does not necessarily need to provide many sites, storage etc., but should enable useful functionalities that free accounts lack.
Therefore the Pro Lite upgrade does not increase your number of sites (=5), but upgrades them all to Pro Lite status and enable e.g.:
- custom domain mapping — use an external domain for your site
- custom favicon
- more private members (10)
- uploading files up to 25 MB each
- flexible storage with 3 GB space included that can be freely distributed between sites
Pro Lite users also get forum signatures, pro "star" icon and access to pro.wikidot.com and cost only $24.95 (or €24.95 in EU, VAT included) for one year subscription. (Upgrades from Pro Lite to other plans are also available)
See the detailed plan comparison for more information.
We also managed to set up direct card payments as an alternative to PayPal payments. Supported cards include Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club, IDEAL and Eurocard. This is provided by an external, secure service MultiCards.com. Having both methods, PayPal and direct card payments, has been our goal from the first day we started thinking about providing paid services. Card payments will be certainly the first choice for many of our users.
Comments: 7 | category: News / Wikidot news
Email notifications (aka Watching)
1234522262|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Today we are introducing a new, highly requested feature at Wikidot: email notifications (aka watching), so that you can follow (watch) activity at Wikidot by receiving emails directly into your Inbox.
The feature is really great (we had it enabled for a few testing accounts) and allows you to be instantly notified about page edits, forum discussions, page comments etc. for pages, categories or whole sites.
Obviously email notifications solve an important problem of users not being aware of what is going on in their sites. We have seen many contributions to both public and private wikis left unnoticed by other members. Although we do provide full activity stream by RSS already, sadly RSS is still not common and easy enough to use for many people.
Introducing the "watching" feature is a very important and large task for us, but even in the pre-launch period this feature alone enormously improved our online activity at our own wikis. Hopefully this will also work for many other users.
The feature is explained in more detais in our FAQ section.
Of course if you do not wish to receive emails from Wikidot, there is a very quick way to disable them by following a special link in any of such emails.
Comments: 85 | category: News / Wikidot news
Universal Edit Button on Wikidot
1234434745|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Wikidot joins dozens of other wiki, blogging and content-creation platforms in the effort of making content-editing a more straightforward experience. Starting today, Wikidot sites now support Universal Edit Button. UEB is a green pencil icon 
in the address bar that indicates that a web page is editable. It is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon that indicates there is an RSS feed available.
Here is an example screenshot of how the UEB icon is displayed on a Wikidot page:
Moreover, once you click the button, the page will switch to the "edit mode" instantly. Great, isn't it?
To see the icon, you will need to install the UEB Firefox extension, which will work out-of-the-box with Wikidot, Wikipedia, Wikihow and literally hundreds (or thousands?) of other websites. At the moment only Firefox is supported, but as far as I can see this is the most popular browser among Wikidotters.
HINT: if you want to start editing really quickly, you can do it by hitting CTRL+E, and save the page with CTRL+S. This works on any browser.
Comments: 4 | category: News / Wikidot news
Try Pro features for 30 days (free)
1231328983|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Hi,
in case you missed one of our last milestones, in December we introduced Pro accounts for our Users — subscription-based accounts that extend functionality of the common free accounts we are offering, increase the limits (like number of sites to create and more storage) and hopefully provide better experience when working with Wikidot-powered sites.
Many users suggested us that it would be nice to actually test what the Pro accounts offer before purchasing it. So, without any more buzz, we would like to encourage you to check out our new
30-day Pro account trial, with no obligations
Once you enroll into the trial program, your account and all your sites will be automatically upgraded to Pro Trial status and will gain access to all premium features we have. The only features that will not be upgraded are: storage space, limit of sites you maintain and limit of members in private sites. This is mostly to ensure that if you decide not to upgrade your account later, we can gracefully downgrade your account and your sites without deleting or disabling your content.
More resources:
- Pro plans explained
- Pro plans and upgrades -- Frequently Asked Questions
- Upgrade panel within MyAccount
We hope you will find our Pro features useful and they let you use Wikidot more efficiently. Good luck!
Michal & The Wikidot Team
Comments: 4 | category: News / Wikidot news
Happy Holiday!
1230069635|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Our whole Team would like to take a moment and wish You Happy Holiday! Whether it is Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just Winter Holiday and New Year, we wish you all peaceful time with your families, friends and relatives.
The end of the year is always a good time to make a short summary of what we have achieved and to revise plans for the future. For us here at Wikidot the year 2008 was very important and very exciting. The most outstanding milestones in our opinion were:
- We managed to sustain the growth of Wikidot, from 57 661 registered users at the end of 2007, to almost 260 000 at present. In 2008 our Users edited pages 5.5 million times.
- We started partnership with Google's AdSense which allowed our users to earn money from their wikis.
- Wikidot Inc. has been created by us to run Wikidot more efficiently.
- We added very important features to Wikidot itself that allow great customization of wikis and building advanced workflows (look at templates or the ListPages module).
- I and my colleagues Wikidot started blogging, also in order to check if Wikidot can be effectively used for blogging.
- A new design of our front page was introduced in November.
- In December we finally launched Pro accounts as a significant addition to the existing free offering.
- Meanwhile we kept improving stability and performance of the service, which now handles almost 4 million visits and 35 million pageviews per month (and growing fast), which is quite a lot.
It looks like the next year will be even more exciting. For Wikidot it will be certainly time to expand, both as the free service and as a premium offer.
We all wish you Happy Holiday!
BTW: Most of us are having a few days off now so we might not be able to respond to your emails and questions right away this last week of the year. Thank you for your understanding.
Comments: 2 | category: News / Wikidot news
Launching Pro accounts
1229516457|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Without much exaggeration — today is a very important day for Wikidot, our Team and you, our great Users. So far using Wikidot has been free, now we are making the next step in the development of our service. On behalf of our whole Team I am happy to announce the launch of paid services at Wikidot.com that greatly extend our existing free offering.
Obviously many people appreciate Wikidot as a free service. For the last two years being free was our key to success. But offering solely free services has serious disadvantages and very often we are not able to fulfill the growing expectations of our Users within the free model. Our goal is to combine the best of both worlds by continuing offering the free services and adding useful and requested features that can make using Wikidot more efficient as extra paid features.
For the last couple of months, backed by our helpful community, we have been designing and building the subscription plans and accompanying features. Today we are happy to officially launch the premium services.
The Pro plans, valid for your whole Wikidot account and all your Sites, allow you to:
- create more Sites,
- use more storage space (10 GB and up) and larger files (50 MB per file, more to come),
- use custom domain for your Sites,
- generate advanced web statistics for all your Sites,
- access your Sites through secure SSL,
- add favicons for your Sites,
- create your forum signature,
- add more privacy control (protect your profile),
- access pro.wikidot.com — internal issue tracker and forums for better contact with our Team,
- get faster responses with priority email support
and much more, with prices starting at $5 / month.
Read the plan comparison and Upgrades FAQ for more details.
I deeply believe the introduction of paid model will not only improve the experience of Pro User, but will also let us invest even more money and work in Wikidot.com. Therefore owners of free accounts should also benefit from this change in our strategy.
Best regards,
Michal Frackowiak and The Wikidot Team
Comments: 7 | category: News / Wikidot news
New front page launched
1227706402|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
After dozens of hours, weeks of planning and many attempts we are more than happy to introduce the new front page for Wikidot. It is not just a theme, but the new structure of pages and a step in improving the perception of our service.
First of all we tried to see how people actually use Wikidot and highlight the most popular applications. We have also asked some of our users for feedback and testimonials that we could use with the new theme — thank you for all the great responses, we are simply overwhelmed by them!
We also wanted to feature more great Wikis on the front page. We will try to rotate the Wikis from time to time (BTW: if you have a popular / beautiful / useful Wiki and want to be featured, let us know).
As one of the next steps we will try to improve the "My Account" area and gradually convert it into a Dashboard with the overview of all activities related to your account, so that regular users would go directly there.
We hope the changes will improve usability and make Wikidot more productive and easy to work with.
Most credits should go to Lukasz (Squark) who designed the major part of the work and kept his eye on everything.
BTW: We realize there are still a few places to fix, we are working on it!
Comments: 20 | category: News / Wikidot news
New front page design preview
1226656507|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
For the last couple of weeks one of our tasks was to redesign the front page of Wikidot. The goal was to make it clear, simple, informative and easy to navigate. As always. After a couple of iterations and designs that have never seen the daylight, we would like to show you a "sneak peek preview" of how the main page of Wikidot will look like within a few weeks. We are planning to change the design simultaneously with the introduction of paid services (more information later).
The preview is currently available at testtheme.wikidot.com, our temporary testing site.
We are still working on the content, so please do not take it as final. But we really would like to share our vision with you and hear your opinions and suggestions!
Comments: 14 | category: News / Wikidot news
Showing AdSense ads to anonymous users only
1225272599|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Today we are introducing a feature that has been suggested by many users who either use our AdSense integration or are looking into it. Just a word to those who are not familiar with it: we are allowing our users to put AdSense ads on their pages and we share revenue with them. This is done through AdSense API, a program from Google that makes such integration a piece of cake. When you are using AdSense with Wikidot, Google pays you directly based on the number of clicks in your ads and some other "magic" factors.
Anyway, the problem some of you have is:
- You want to display ads on your Wikis and earn money. This is obvious.
- You do not want to discourage regular users and members by exposing to ads. This is especially important on community wikis, forums etc.
We have performed a study on a selected number of sites. Our solution, very simple, is that now you can display AdSense ads only to users without a Wikidot.com account (aka anonymous users). Why can this benefit you?
- Some of the Wikidot users appreciate the fact that Wikidot is ad-free by default. Most likely they would also appreciate your Wiki as ad-free too, especially if it is a community site, like a forum.
- Regular users do not click ads — this is called ad blindness. If they visit your site often, at some point they simply ignore the ads.
- So you are not likely to make much money from them at all (our study shows that on average only 5% of clicks come from registered users).
- On the other hand your regular users can contribute vastly to the number of pageviews, up to 80-90% on community sites like forums.
- This together makes your ad perform terribly in terms of click per impression ratio (CTR).
- Anonymous users, that come from search engines (like Google) contribute about 50% to the total number of visits. Anonymous users generate up to 90% of earnings today on some wikis.
- By disabling ads for your regular users you can improve performance of your ads and (magically!) this can vastly improve you total earnings.
So the most important benefits of displaying ads to the anonymous users only are:
- Browsing your Site is now nicer for registered users (no ads).
- Improve performance of your ads (if you are lost in our explanation above, just try this).
- Can improve your overall earnings!
We highly recommend setting this option to everyone. In fact, the ads are being displayed to anonymous users only by default now. If you do not like it, you can change it back. Simply go to the AdSense panel and click on configure wikis, but please give it a try for a while.
If you are deep into AdSense, probably you already know that many services are using such an distinction between visitors with very good results.
If you have never used our AdSense options, now there is one more reason to try it. Your regular users will not be exposed to ads, so they should not mind at all, but you could get some nice pocket money!
Links:
- Wikidot + AdSense explained
- AdSense management panel
- moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus — we are happy to answer any questions!
Comments: 7 | category: News / Wikidot news
Wikidot video tutorial
1221485819|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Hi all Wikidottians,
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.
Comments: 1 | category: News / Wikidot news
Back to school
1220261498|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
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.
Comments: 8 | category: News / Wikidot news
Security upgrades, bugs fixed
1219064667|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Dear Wikidottians,
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
Comments: 18 | category: News / Wikidot news
Issues with custom domains and logging in
1218449376|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
Recently we have noticed problems with logging in into wikis that are using custom domains (e.g. example.com instead of example.wikidot.com). Some minor problems affect Safari 3.0+ and IE7+. Firefox 3.0+ is not affected, 2.0 also works fine.
If you are unable to log-in into one of wikis on the custom domains, try the following:
- Go to www.wikidot.com and try to log in there (link in the top right corner).
- After you have logged in, go to the wiki at an external domain — you should be logged in automatically.
- If unsuccessful, try deleting cookies for the custom domain and for the wikidot.com domain and try the above steps again.
- 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.
Comments: 30 | category: News / Wikidot news
Tip of the week and new featured wiki
1217935220|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
During the everyday review of our favourite wikis we found a new, brilliant code snippet. We always admire it when people use Wikidot tools to create amazing effects and applications we have never thought about. After a short conversation we agreed and decided to regularly post Tips Of The Week in our News section. Every 7 days we will choose best solutions for your own wiki site improvement.
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!
Comments: 4 | category: News / Wikidot news
Major server upgrades, themes improvement and new Wikidot Team member
1217592053|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
This week we have done a lot of work which probably nobody has noticed. Which is good because we were upgrading software on our servers. On Wednesday we have applied a major upgrade to our PostgreSQL database and data replication and today we migrated all our web servers from Apache to Lighttpd (which required a major redesign of the Wikidot software too and is so far the biggest change in our structures).
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.
Comments: 1 | category: News / Wikidot news
