Archive | June, 2007

Latest features roundup: Spreadsheets, voice chat, event-planning, calendars, & video upload

26 Jun

PBwiki has become a full-fledged platform with amazing third-party widgets that you can drop into your wikis. Here’s a demo video of how it works:


Click To Play

Just last week, we announced these new features.

Spreadsheets directly on your wiki (more info here)

spreadsheets81.jpg

Video upload to your wiki, or embedded from YouTube (more info here)

Event planning with the Eventbrite plugin (More info here)

Voice chat with the YackPack plugin (more info here)


Click To Play

Shared calendars on PBwiki (more info here) (scroll to the middle of the video)


Click To Play

And finally, the new beta of the PBwiki Installer, which lets you share Word documents right from MS Word. Phew.

Third-party widgetmakers and companies: We want you!
We’re now accepting submissions from third-party vendors to offer great widgets and apps for the PBwiki community. More information here.

For our users: Tell us what you want to see
We’re working to make PBwiki better and better for you. If there’s something you want to see, leave a comment here!

Welcome to our newest engineer, Jim Blomo

26 Jun

Jim Blomo, a friend of mine since junior high (!), joined the PBwiki team last week.

Growing up in the rough neighborhood of IRC’s #crackz, Jim escaped the shadowy life of “reverse engineering” to become classically trained at UC Berkeley’s EECS program. There he participated in all things nerdy: playing the Cal Marching Band, being a Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholar, and moving through the ranks of Residential Computing. After graduating, he entered the wild world of ops at A9.com, running Amazon.com’s product search.

Jim Blomo

We’re thrilled to have him help us make PBwiki even better, so please welcome Jim to our team!

(To see other job openings at PBwiki, visit our Jobs page.)

PBwiki one of PC World's Top 25 Sites to Watch!

26 Jun

PC World named PBwiki last week as one of their Top 25 web sites to watch, along with our buddies at OpenDNS. 🙂

PC World says “The site’s simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki” – woo!

Read the full article at PCworld.com!

PBwiki Wall Computer

25 Jun

PBwiki Wall ComputerSo we like to have fun here, too. You just can’t help but want to hack on neat projects with such talented engineers around, so Nathan, Brian, and I put together a computer that is attached to our wall with thumbtacks, displays hundreds of silly cats, and makes a sound whenever interesting things happen at PBwiki, like when someone upgrades. We tried having it make a sound whenever anyone edited, but the loud and continuous torrent of noises proved too much.

New feature: Plan an event using your wiki

19 Jun

Have you ever wanted to plan an event, coordinate RSVPs, and even sell tickets right from your wiki?

Lots of people already use their PBwikis to plan events (e.g., here and here).

Now, we’ve added a free feature to make event-planning easier. We partnered with Eventbrite, the leading online event registration service, so you can sell event tickets and collect registration information online. You can publish, promote, manage, and sell out your events with Eventbrite and PBwiki.

Watch the video below to see how easy it is to insert the Event Promoter plugin on your wiki.

(What the video says: To use the new feature, click “Edit Page”, Insert Plugin, and then hover over “Productivity” to “Plan an Event.”)

The big news: You can plan an event, coordinate RSVPs, and even sell tickets right from your wiki using the Eventbrite plugin — free.

Share Word docs with our PBwiki Installer — available now in beta

18 Jun

[Update, 1/30/08: We’ve put this project on hold, so please disregard the blog post below.]

We just released a super-very-much-not-final beta of the PBwiki Installer at http://install.pbworks.com.

Share Word documents through PBwiki
Want to collaborate on a Word document? Use the Installer to send files to PBwiki and collaborate with your co-workers. You can send your Word files to PBwiki in two ways:

1. In Word, just click File >> Send to PBwiki.
PBwiki Installer in Word

2. Use the dropbox to drag Word files to PBwiki. Just drag files to the dropbox and they’ll magically appear in your wiki.

PBwiki dropbox

Coming up: the ability to send documents to your wiki alone, improved notifications on your desktop, and a Mac version (depending on demand). David spent many late nights on this, so give it a shot!

Download the PBwiki Installer here.

Want some free materials to spread the word about PBwiki?

12 Jun

We have some free PBwiki materials I want to share with you.

Lots of our users give talks about wikis. Some are teachers, like the 1,000+ who responded to an email I sent out a few months ago asking if they plan to present about wikis. (They presented in places like Maine, Malaysia, and Texas — see pictures.) Others are just casual users who want to show their friends what a wiki is. Sometimes, employees in big companies want to communicate the idea of a wiki to their boss.

For everyone, we’ve developed the PBwiki Presenter Packs, which include videos, how-to guides, and more. Until now, you had to sign up to get them (and if you want a free PBwiki t-shirt, you should still sign up).

But now you can download the PBwiki Presenter Pack materials and use them for free right here. Enjoy!

-Ramit

What do you think of these ideas for new PBwiki features?

11 Jun

We’ve been hearing requests for certain features, so we’ve put together some surveys to learn more about how they might be used. Please take the surveys below and tell us! (Max time: 10 minutes.)

Quickie Tidbit: Disallow Search Indexing

11 Jun

Some people who run wikis that are publicly accessible have asked us for the ability to set a robots.txt that tells polite search engines like Google, MSN, Alexa, and Yahoo to please not index the content of the public PBwiki.  We listened and added this functionality. If you’d like to enable this on your PBwiki, just go to the “Public / Private” settings tab and click Disable indexing. This sets your robots.txt, updates your page headers, and even puts a setting in your RSS & Atom feeds to discourage feed readers & scrapers from republishing your public feed.

10 Things You Didn't Know About PBwiki (Tip #22)

7 Jun

totw-banner.jpg

Ramit Sethi (PBwiki marketing guru) and I spoke recently about doing something a little different before I continue with your regularly scheduled Tip programming, so this is what we’ve decided: PBwiki has a lot of information spread out all over the place, and it’d be nice to pick a few of these things and consolidate them all in one place for users to reference. If this is helpful, I may do it once or twice more in the future. Let me know your thoughts by commenting below or e-mailing me at jason.nguyen@pbworks.com

Now, I’m not saying that you won’t know all 10 of the things on the list, but for the average PBwiki citizen, a lot of these things might be new. If none of them are new to you, then you’re probably as much of a PBwiki geek as me and you need to get some air *wink*. Anyway, on with the list:

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