PBwiki status update

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

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.

Post Your PBwiki In The New Public PBwiki Directory

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.

PBwiki Biggest Loser Challenge

Late last week in the office we had a discussion about weight loss. From this conversation we developed the PBwiki Biggest Loser challenge. For a $100 ante, PBwiki employees can enter into this 60 day challenge to be the biggest loser.

We wouldn’t be PBwiki if we didn’t somehow incorporate a wiki into this challenge. We use a wiki to track our progress, trash talk each other, and log our exercise goals and food intake.
  • The page template tool allowed us to easily create an exercise log for each participating employee.
  • Because the wiki is private I don’t need to worry that every Tom, Dick and Harry on the Internet knows my current weight and how many chocolate chip cookies I just had to have for breakfast this morning.
  • Email notifications of wiki changes are a great motivating factor – when I’m feeling like staying home and watching TV, I get an update saying that a colleague has done the treadmill and it gets me over to the gym.

The PBwiki Biggest Loser challenge runs until Monday August 25th. Watch out PBwiki, I’m going to win!

UPDATE: Wow! The responses to my blog post about the PBwiki Biggest Loser challenge have been awesome! For everyone who is looking for the spreadsheet we used, it’s actually just a simple formula:
Total weight loss divided by the starting weight times 100.

You can see the table we used here: http://pbwikibiggestloser.pbworks.com/Spreadsheet
(By the way, this is a private wiki. I made this one page public using the new Page Security tools from PBwiki 2.0). Good luck on your own challenges!

New Feature — Improved Search, More Accurate Results

As your wiki grows, it becomes increasingly important to be able to search and locate your information. We’ve heard from many of you that PBwiki search just wasn’t cutting it.

Good news! We’ve improved PBwiki search and made it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Use these familiar search commands to improve your results:

SEARCH RESULTS
brown -cow To find pages that contain “brown” but not “cow”
“Bay to Breakers” The exact phrase “Bay to Breakers”
yellow green blue Any of the words “yellow”, “green”, or “blue”

Also, search results are sorted by weight, which means that a page with a lot of the mention of the keyword will show up at the top of the list.

Feedback?
We love feedback! Click here to let us know what you think.

The Universal Edit Button

When the web was first conceived, it was intended to be a read/write medium. Right now, wikis are the best implementation of that vision: web pages that are easy for people to edit directly from their web browser.

Yesterday, we heard about the Universal Edit Button from a commenter on Get Satisfaction. When we looked into it, we thought it was a great idea: the Universal Edit Button is a Firefox extension that adds an “Edit” button right in your browser on pages that support it. We are happy to say that we now support this great idea, joining a growing number of wiki providers online. You’ll see it on all PBwiki 2.0 pages (PBwiki 1.0 will get it on Monday) that you have writer access to — it’s a pencil in a green square:

Right now, you have to have to be using Firefox to use the extension, but people are working on a version for Internet Explorer. Keep up to date at the official Universal Edit Button web site.

Coming in July — Bay Area Customer Meeting

Learn how to create a comprehensive collaboration strategy, including specific tactics to make your wiki successful within your organization.

Join us July 8th at 6:00PDT in Menlo Park to meet the PBwiki senior team and hear expert advice from successful customers — plus, get a future roadmap of PBwiki key features.

This event is limited to only 50 people and will give individuals the chance to learn:

  • Customer tips for driving explosive wiki adoption
  • Expert demos and live feature previews from senior PBwiki engineers
  • Actionable advice from one of PBwiki’s most successful users

Spaces are limited, so register today.

PBwiki named "Best" online wiki by The Product Guy

Jeremy Horn of The Product Guy blog spent several weeks evaluating the various on-demand wikis available on the market.

After taking in depth looks at five different wikis, including Google Sites, he named PBwiki “The Best Free Online Wiki Experience.”

“The Best Free Online Wiki Experience is PBwiki for the reasons stated throughout this series, as well as having: (1) a firm grasp on the usability needs of a wiki user, (2) the most comprehensive feature set, and (3) providing outstanding support to its user base, not just in the form of addressing problems, but also in actively communicating status, product updates, and other helpful news via their product blog.”

Thanks Jeremy!

New feature: Allow users to request access to your wiki

Today, we’ve enabled a new feature on your wiki: Request Access allows users to request access to your wiki.

Who would use Request Access?
It’s perfect if you want to add users to your wiki, but don’t want to manage the process of figuring out their email address, adding them, and managing them. You’ll still be able to add users to your wiki, but Request Access allows your users to make your life easier. Request Access is one of our core steps to making our login system easier to use.

How Request Access works
1. Someone wants to access your wiki (maybe you suggested they contribute)
2. They go to your wiki and click “Log in”
3. They’ll see a login page. Since they don’t have access to your wiki, they click “Request Access” and fill out some basic information
4. You’re sent an email with simple instructions on allowing the user wiki access (or ignoring them)

Screenshots
This is what your users will see when they try to log in to your wiki:

If they don’t have a username/password, they’ll be able to click “Request access,” which will take them to a page where they can identify themselves to the wiki administrator(s):

As the wiki administrator, you’ll receive an email that will allow you to grant access (or ignore the request).

…and they’re added to your wiki! No more wondering if you got the email address right or giving complicated instructions to log in to your wiki. Once you grant access, PBwiki handles the signup process in the background and lets you manage users from Settings >> Users.

As one of our beta testers said:

I love it. Since I’ve got a private wiki that we keep adding people to, previously I had to go and enter everyone in. I was never sure if I entered the right email.

[Request Access] makes logging in easier. First off, I get an email notification, so I don’t just get a random email from someone. I can just click on the link and approve! Hooray!

I like request access better than entering folks in individually.

Turning Request Access off
If you don’t want to allow users to request access to your wiki, you can always disable this feature by clicking Settings >> Security.

We love feedback!
Thanks for using PBwiki, and if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it.

New feature: Email notifications look better, work better

We’re happy to announce our improved notifications emails, which have new functionality and a brand-new visual design. We previewed these earlier, and today we’re launching these to all PBwiki 2.0 wikis. (Still on PBwiki 1.0? Click here to update your 2.0 wiki before everyone else.)

The new notifications include:

  • Comment notifications. Your email notifications now include any comments made on your wiki.
  • Better organized notifications. We’ve improved your email notifications so you’ll get a record of each change on your wiki in a more organized way.
  • A new look and feel. I know my mom told me to be modest, but I can’t help myself — they look awesome!

Feedback?
We love feedback! Please let us know what you think.