I often find myself in a situation where I need to explain to a non-tech person what Wikidot is. And I do not have an hour for long talk, just a sentence or two. The shorter the better. And it's perfect when people respond That's interesting, I need to try it.

One thing for sure, there is such an enormous diversity among sites on Wikidot that it might seem difficult to find a definition what Wikidot really is. I could say "Wikidot is a platform that empowers its users to build amazing wikis", which is very close to truth.

A problem I find is that many people have no idea what a wiki is. Those who do, when they say wiki, they often mean Wikipedia. You can use this fact by saying Do you know Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia that people collaboratively edit? So Wikidot is like "a small Wikipedia for everyone". But this does not really work. One look at most popular Wikidot sites and you will see they are nothing like "small Wikipedias".

One of the most lovely features of Wikidot is support for code blocks. If you are a programmer, you probably want to share some pieces of your code. At Wikidot just wrap such a code in a [[code]] … [[/code]] tags (use [[code type="php"]] if you share PHP code) and you'll get beautifully highlighted code. Like this one:

<?php
$dna = '*';
echo str_replace(chr(42), $dna, base64_decode($dna));
?>

Dear Wikidot Users,

in this blog post we would like to announce a new place that is designed to collect user ideas and problem reports. Meet:

feedback.wikidot.com

Right now there are two major sections on the site:

• Problems (bugs) — if you think there is something wrong with Wikidot, e.g. an action button does not work as expected, a wiki page cannot be properly displayed etc. If we can confirm it and it is a real bug, we will try to fix it as soon as possible.

• Ideas (wishes) — if you have an idea or suggestion how to make Wikidot better, easier, more powerful, friendlier — please share it. We will gladly review ideas, and implement them if we find it worth doing. Others can vote on ideas, so that we know better what is important for our users.

More options for Pro users

Starting 2. April we would like to give Pro users better ways to monetize their sites. So far AdSense has been the only supported option. It has been working well for some users, but we frequently get questions about including other ad networks.

As a solution we will provide a tool within Site Manager to set up ads based on HTML code generated by a particular ad network. For example, if you have a Google AdSense account, you could go to your AdSense panel, create a new ad, get the code and paste it directly into your ad config on Wikidot. We would also give you options to set placement, visibility etc.

Please forgive me for starting this post by saying that Wikidot is an amazing project¹. It started with an idea to build a community - a social-oriented group of websites, using the wiki concept. Wikis for everyone. As advanced and fully-featured as we can deliver.

Later, Wikidot started growing, attracted early users and investors, and that helped to scale Wikidot from merely 20,000 users to the almost half a million we have now. But what is more important, is that we have successfully scaled from a one-man project to a scalable service operated by a small, but smart team, backed by a community of Wikidot users helping us to run the project.

After 4 years of working with Wikidot, it clearly is a successful project to me. I have been watching several attempts to build wiki farms, often backed by large companies or having millions of $$ in investment, that died without getting any reasonable traction. The ones that succeeded, including WetPaint, WikiSpaces and Wikia, are not that far away from us in terms of popularity as a measure of success.

We have been planning a migration to better and faster (and more) servers for a while. Adding new servers is quite easy, but when you finally need to cut off old expensive servers it gets more complicated. You must ensure no data is lost, update all DNS settings and route traffic from old IP addresses to new ones.

We are using various techniques to monitor health of Wikidot servers, ranging from our home-brewed scripts, to external services like Pingdom. Actually, Pingdom is really great and their automated services alert us every time there is a low-level problem with Wikidot — e.g. servers are overloaded and cannot handle connections, something crashes, datacenter has network problems etc.