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.

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 us on Twitter now!

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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 us on Facebook now!

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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.

Join us on LinkedIn now!

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

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.

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.

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.