In August, the Standard Template was officially released and has since then seen some success. While a very good start for general purpose sites, it is now time to start unveiling task-specific applications, starting with…
New design! Hoooray!
Everyone loves great designs especially when it comes to the web. This is why we introduced Bootstrap-compatible layouts a while ago to let you create great wikis with fresh themes. Now it's time to eat our own dog food and use it to refresh our front page, blog and the feedback sites. The account dashboard got a redesign too!
Wikidot has just moved to its new office. It's still in Toruń, Poland ;-)
Our new offices are hosted at a newly created business accelerator center BusinessLink. Apart from offering only office space its goal is to "accelerate" companies by providing know-how, business opportunities and support.
On behalf of the whole Wikidot Team I would like to wish you all the best in the new 2014 year!
Wikidot is all about wikis, websites and communities. Therefore we wish you many successful wikis, active communities, many great contributions and page edits.
We would also like to thank you for being with us in 2013, your engagement in community forums, your help in tracking issues and working on new features. And for using Wikidot in the first place — that's what Wikidot is for!
Once again, all the best in 2014! Take care!
— Michał and the Wikidot Team
Here's a quick summary of what has been going on at Wikidot recently.
Bitcoin promotion extended indefinitely
On Nov, 29 we launched a week-long Black Friday promotion. This time it was different. For the very first time you could purchase account upgrades with Bitcoin and we would give a 50% discount to those paying with Bitcoin. Optimistically speaking, we have learned there definitely is a huge potential in Bitcoin payments, but it still needs to be unleashed.
However, we have decided to keep the promo on-going and offer 15% discount for all upgrades paid with Bitcoin.
Infrastructure changes
From time to time we are plagued with internal issues. Servers being overloaded, sometimes dying, traffic spikes causing enormous stress on our machines, DDoS attacks etc. Over the years we have learned how to cope with such issues and internal problems very rarely affect the Wikidot as a service. Yes, there is a lot of redundancy in our setup, several metrics and alarms constantly monitor health of servers and there are mechanisms that can failover to a hot stand-by servers in case any of critical ones fail.
However recently some database and web worker issues affected the stability of Wikidot. We had to take radical steps and literally re-created large parts of our infrastructure. Wikidot is now being hosted in an isolated Virtual Private Cloud within Amazon Web Services. This gives us better connectivity between our 30 servers and improves manageability. As before, servers are spread over multiple availability zones, so in case any zone goes down (which sometimes happen), Wikidot should continue its operation (or at least make the recovery much faster).
We did the transition last Friday. There are still a couple of issues we keep working on, but the overall stability of infrastructure seems fine.
New ad formats for pro sites
Premium site owners can now paste Yandex and Google Adsense asynchronous code snippets within the ad management section of Site Manager.
Layouts improvements
Although Layouts are far from mainstream yet, we can see dozens of Bootstrap-based wikis under construction, which is great. We are working on several improvements and new components, to be announced soon!
NOTE: This is a blog post about 2013 promotion. The 2014 promo post is here!
I bet you've heard about Bitcoin — a new internet currency that is taking the world by storm. Invented in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, for a few years it remained a niche project — developed by enthusiastic developers, supported by a very small but strong community, now seems to be ready to revolutionize internet payments. There has not been a single financial or economics new source that would not mention Bitcoin in the last few months.
Now the real news — we are excited to announce that Wikidot joins the Bitcoin marketplace and
you can now pay for Wikidot upgrades with Bitcoin!
There's more: if you upgrade or prolong your Wikidot account between now and Sun, 8th Dec and pay with Bitcoin you
save 50% on all upgrades!!!
We hope that accepting Bitcoin is not only an awesome news for our current and future users, but we deeply believe we can help growing the economy based on digital currencies.
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