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.

The Wikidot Community is very creative and can use features that programmers develop in a very clever way. Here they explain how to embed custom HTML into Wikidot pages. As you see it's possible, but quite hard. But most importantly that page showcases the resourceful community and how powerful Wikidot is.

As Pieter mentioned in the previous post, I am stepping in as a person-in-charge at Wikidot. Pieter has been leading the project for a long time (he came on-board not more than a year after Wikidot.com launched) and now he is moving to his other promising projects. During past months Wikidot benefited from several great contributions and improvements by Pieter, and I believe what Wikidot is now is undeniably also thanks to Pieter's engagement. Thanks and good luck!

Over the last year we've been working, at Wikidot, on creating more general tools for building Wikidot-based applications. For me as CEO, applications was always the way to bring a mass audience to Wikidot. It's how Microsoft conquered the desktop, with Visual Basic for Windows. It's how Apple bit into the smartphone market. Gaming communities and Snow Leopard sites do create volume but it's superficial. They don't use Wikidot except for text and images, and they can pick up and leave in a second (and they do).