Archive | July, 2008

Pre-register for the next PBwiki Camp

30 Jul

Over 1,500 teachers signed up for PBwiki summer camp. Check out what they’re saying:

“This course is incredible and the amount of info is overwhelming 🙂 not in a bad way”

“I want to learn as much as I can about the “free” tools available to educators. This weeks resources page is amazing! I’ve heard and used some of the tools but will make use of many more by they end of the camp. This is awesome!”

“Thank you for all the tools and information you are providing. It is a tremendous help and is saving me a plethora of hours trying to find Internet tools to use in the classroom. I so appreciate what you’re doing.” -p.c.ames

PBwiki Summer Camp has been so successful and we want to make sure everyone has an opportunity to participate. You can now pre-register for the next free PBwiki camp and be the first to know when it’s taking place.

Register here

Search 2.0: Now Better, Faster, Stronger

28 Jul

Mmm, dogfood. Here at PBwiki, we make use of our own product pretty extensively. And having used an internal PBwiki for some three years, we’ve accumulated a pretty large collection of material! This makes it ever more important that we be able to search it and find what we’re looking for. So we’ve dramatically overhauled (and improved) search.

You may have noticed when PBwiki search improved a few weeks ago, getting phrase search, boolean inclusion/exclusion, and filename matching. Well hold onto your pants, because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Search has been dramatically restyled again:

  • Information about who last edited a page and when
  • Suggesting page names similar to your search query
  • An adding helpful icons to the result list to let you quickly distinguish wiki pages from PDFs
  • Giving up to 200 characters of “snippet” context (vs 80 previously)
  • Ranking search results and interleaving results from wiki pages, discussions, and filenames
  • Letting you drill down to only search pages with a given tag or in a certain folder

OLD Search:

NEW Search:

Coming very soon? The ability to search inside PDFs, Word DOCs, Excel files, PowerPoint, and more.

If you have feedback about this new feature, what you like and don’t, please chip in here and I’ll read every comment! 🙂

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PBwiki status update

28 Jul

In our excitement to push out some great new features today, we introduced a bug that made notification emails on your 2.0 PBwikis act a little strange: messages were including changes you were already notified about, and timestamps were showing up in GMT. Both of these issues have been fixed, and you shouldn’t see any last side-effects.

The problem was in effect from approximately 4:48 PDT to 5:50 PDT. We’re sorry for the issues in notifications that were sent out during this time period.

Can PBwiki Help You Get A Job?

18 Jul

eWeek suggests that publishing information on your wiki may help techies in the job search:

Like the Academia from which the industry sprung, career Techies have long sought publishing – professional journals, trade publications, books – as a means to push their process, tout their technique and promote their name.

The concept has never been easier thanks to the Wiki and it’s the first place a Web 2.0-phobe should turn to self-promote “add business value to your career,” said Joe Gentry, CTO and Senior VP of Software AG, who fancies himself knowledgeable in the matters of IT career navigation.

“If you are a developer, analyst or administrator with a couple of decades under your belt, you’ll probably concede (as a good corporate citizen) that there’s a bunch of business domain knowledge stored inside your head that ought to be passed along to others in the organization before you call it a career,” Gentry said. “But writing a stack of traditional user manuals is like eating dirt, right?”

The author is kind enough to then link to PBwiki (along with two other companies who shall remain nameless) as a great tool to create and share your knowledge.

If you go down this path, don’t forget to share your knowledge with others by submitting your site to the Public PBwiki Directory.

PBwiki in the News: Awards, Saving Lives in Iraq, and Helping Contractors

17 Jul

We’ve got a couple more PBwiki stories to share…

We’re #1!  We’re #1! We’re #1!

SEOmoz gave PBwiki 1st Prize in the “Hosted Wikis” category of the annual Web 2.0 Awards.  We’d like to thank the Academy, our director, our co-stars…but now they’re cueing the music and shooing us off the stage.

Wikis at War

Over on the Wikinomics Blog, we’ve got a guest post up about how the University of Wisconsin is using PBwiki for a research project to help protect troops in Iraq from attacks by equipping Hummers with airless tires that are harder to disable.

I’ll Finish Remodeling The Kitchen After I Check My Wiki

PBwiki reaches out to contractors with an appearance in the LowesForPros newsletter from the popular home improvement superstore.  We talk about how PBwiki makes creating your own company intranet a lot easier than you might think.  Now if only you could use your walkie-talkie to post edits….

Join PBwiki summer camp and earn a free classroom wiki

14 Jul

Want to build the ultimate classroom wiki and have it ready for the start of the fall semester?

Join us for PBwiki Summer Camp!

We know that a lot of educators have heard about wikis but just aren’t sure how to use them in the classroom. In PBwiki Summer Camp you will learn the best way to structure your classroom site, engage your students with audio and video and connect with experienced wiki mentors.

At the end of the summer, Campers who have followed the program receive a free platinum wiki for the school year, as well as some fun swag along the way.

PBwiki Summer Camp is full – we are no longer accepting applications for new campers! If you would like to sign up for the next PBwiki Camp,

PBwiki status update

8 Jul

7/8/08, 5:38pm: PBwiki is now fully operational. Thank you for your patience as we worked through this issue.

7/8/08, 5:14pm: Power has been restored to most of our servers, and a dedicated member of our staff is on site working to bring the remaining ones back. We are running routine checks and hope to have service fully restored soon.

7/8/08, 4:43pm: Our datacenter provider, normally the happy home for all our servers, experienced a power outage today that knocked out access many of our wikis.  Sorry for the inconvinience, PBwiki and our provider are scrambling to get everyone connected again!  More updates when we have them.

7/8/08, 3:55pm: If you’ve noticed your wiki is sluggish or inaccessible, we’re aware of the problem: Our upstream network provider is having connectivity issues, and we are monitoring the situation to restore access to your wiki ASAP. Your data is safe, and we’ll update this blog post as soon as possible.

New Feature — Re-arrange Your Sidebar Modules

2 Jul

Have you ever wanted to re-arrange your Sidebar on the right side of your wiki?

At PBwiki, we just love adding new features. There are enough wiki jockeys here in at PBHQ that it guarantees we’ll have differing opinions on how things should work — that’s one of the reasons we work hard to fit lots of different workflows. We’re proud to announce that we just got a bit more flexible: you can now re-arrange the different modules in your sidebar in PBwiki 2.0.

If you don’t use folders, stick the list at the bottom. Use the invitation field a lot? Put it at the top. Take a look at this quick screencast to see how it works.

http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1272105&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Draggable Sidebar Modules from PBwiki on Vimeo.

Note: If you’re still on PBwiki 1.0 and want to update your wiki to PBwiki 2.0, please visit http://www.pbworks.com/2.

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Post Your PBwiki In The New Public PBwiki Directory

1 Jul

Paparazzi

Are you ready for your closeup?

Our new Public PBwiki Directory (www.publicpbwikis.com) lets folks find examples of public PBwikis in all categories.  For example, here’s a list of public PBwikis that are official PBwiki resources.

It’s completely voluntary (you don’t have to submit your site if you don’t want to), but if you’re proud of the work you’ve done, and want to share your PBwiki with the world, submit your link now.