Today we pushed a simple improvement to private categories: if you create a page called categoryname:_public, Wikidot will show this page when a user tries to access the private category and does not have view permissions. You can thus customize what the user sees. Make sure any images you use there are in a public category (e.g. the default).

Facebook's Haiping Zhao explains how he's been working for two years on way of making PHP run much faster. Facebook is now running that on 90% of their servers and they will release the source code this evening. This could be very interesting for Wikidot, since we use PHP and any improvement in performance would be great.

Not quite the Grammies, but still: out of seventeen competition entries, we've finally chosen five prize winners. Guys (I can safely say, because no women entered the competition), please step up to collect your awards.

Another day, another random idea. How about being able to choose a personal color, so that any comments one makes are coloured with that comment? Like signatures, but more subtle. Perhaps a box around the comment, or background shading, or font color…? Maybe related to karma level?

Good news, everybody! You can now mark categories as private, on public sites. This feature is available for all wikis (free and pro). Note that you can't make the default category private, mainly because that would just give you a private wiki, which is still a pro feature.