In December 2008, when we introduced paid accounts at Wikidot, there was a lot of internal debate about the structure of paid plans, billing, payment processing, etc. We were having long negotiations with banks about card processing, which were very difficult because we were a new company, without any payment processing history, and we were often treated as high-risk business.

At the time, we decided to structure our plans with yearly payments only. It seemed much easier for us, and saved us headaches from monthly billing and invoicing. So right now, when you want to upgrade your account you need to pay for a full year up-front, and need to manually prolong your plan after each year.

On Saturday morning, a Polish plane with almost a hundred people on-board crashed in Smoleńsk, west Russia. There were no survivors.

The crash killed off a wide cross-section of Poland’s most important political, military and financial figures. The dead include the Polish President, Lech Kaczyński, his wife, top politicians, members of Parliament, the chief of staff of the army, the heads of air and land forces, the head of Poland’s intelligence service, and many widely known public persons.

It is difficult to express our sadness — the accident is still a shock. The tragedy happened in exactly the same place where 22,000 Polish citizens were murdered and buried in forests of Katyń in March 1940. 70 years later, the history repeats, and once again our country loses its top political elite.

It is a great loss, and a very sad moment in our history.

Earlier today, between 2-3 AM UTC time, one of our main web servers started to behave strangely. Most of its backend processes (PHP) were hanging, and the remaining could not cope with handling the incoming traffic. Technical details aside, this took Wikidot (and hosted wikis) down and the service was not available for about an hour.

For the last half the year, Wikidot.com was up for more than 99.90% of time, with exceptional february-uptime 99.994% uptime and February and 99.90% in March. Our monitoring and early-alert system prevent most incidents even before they happen. So a situation like this one is really rare.

Dear Google Inc.,

independent analysts reviewed our growth, revenue, strategic position and plans for the next few years. The study, conducted by Adam Smith's Economy Center, clearly shows that Wikidot will surpass Google in terms of popularity and revenue by 2040 AC. Which is proven by the graph below:

After a lot of debates, we came to conclusion there is no point in a "cold war" scenario or competition between our projects. They both target Internet, which makes them similar. It would be only a matter of years before we see each other as those stopping one another from becoming a dominant Internet company.

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.