Our very own Nathan!
Nathan is the CTO of Pbwiki.com, a Palo Alto-based startup that is now the world’s largest hoster of wikis.
Nathan will be speaking about “how to keep a popular web service from melting when it becomes popular – Debian, PHP, Apache, Lighttpd, Squid, Memcache, MogileFS and MySQL.”
Nathan was a President Scholar and received a BS in Computer Systems Engineering at Stanford University.
More information from the Stanford Linux Users and Open Source Group.
Here’s an email I wrote to our educational advisory panel (join here) last night:
Well, it’s 10:25pm and I should be getting ready to sleep, but I can’t without getting this email out!! Let me quickly tell you about something we did to make PBwiki easier for your coworkers and students.
We just rolled out a new FrontPage for new wikis that makes it easier to get started. Now when you create a new wiki, you’ll see clearer text, help documents, and quick videos that give you a tour of how to use PBwiki. All this stuff is now on the FrontPage.
Check it out by making a new wiki at http://www.pbworks.com.
Here’s what the new FrontPage looks like (click here to try it out):
The new FrontPage is one of the ways we’re making it easier to get started using PBwiki. Please tell your friends!
There are a few questions I keep seeing in the forums over and over concerning the Point-and-Click editor, and I thought I’d use this space to clear up one of them today: How do I do a Table of Contents (ToC)?
I admit that the answer is not immediately clear like it is on the old Classic editor, where entering the statement “<toc>” on the page would create a table of contents linking to every header on that page created with a “!”, “!!”, or “!!!”.
The idea of the Point-and-Click editor concerning the ToC is exactly the same. Insert a Table of Contents plugin and it will create links from every first, second, and third level header you create. But sometimes you need a little illustration, so here’s everything step by step…
Continue reading “Tip of the Week #19: Inserting a Table of Contents”
Cindy Lane, an instructional technologist, recently presented at an educational event about PBwiki using our Presenter Packs. Her giveaway was one of the most creative we’ve seen!
Yesterday was my pbwiki event…Half of my teachers had actually gone on and logged in and had contributed to the wiki, so I pulled them up front, gave them each TWO packages of 100 calorie peanut butter cookies and told them to find a teacher that had NOT logged on and teach them how, (and give them a package of cookies).
The big prize (peanut butter stuffed pretzels) went to the first person who had logged on, the Project Peanut Butter rubber bracelet went to the last person that logged on…and the three gold wiki keys (coming my way soon I hope!) went to the first two teachers that emailed me (both did this within the following 2 minutes).
Thanks for taking care of my teachers…as you can see, I love ’em too!! and P B W I K I !!!
Cindy even included a video for her educators:
To get your own PBwiki Presenter Pack (including a free t-shirt, white papers to give to your audience, and 3 free Gold wikis to give away–click here.
We just added a tiny sharing sidebar to each wiki. This should make it even easier to share your wiki with friends, colleagues, and anyone else that you want to start collaborating with on your wiki. The sharing sidebar is located beneath the normal sidebar, or, if you have one of the tabbed sidebars, it should appear at the bottom of the Quickstart tab.
Depending on your level of security, you will be given the option to share just a regular link to let others read your wiki, or, another link that will give them full access edit pages, and more. Those who have paid for advanced permissions will have greater control, too. Use these links in e-mail, blogs, chat conversations, tattoo it to your elbow, etc.
The sharing sidebar can be turned off in the admin panel (click “Wiki settings” on the bottom of your wiki).
PBwiki’s really simple, and that’s great, but sometimes, it lets us forget that we’re not only PBwiki users interacting in a peanutty-licious microcosm; instead, we’re webmasters and content creators in our own right, in a vast world full of others who may or may not be PBwiki users. The Internet, with us all involved, is a giant community, and in any community, there are certain expected behaviors that allow us to interact in a meaningful manner with our neighbors.
These behaviors form a few guidelines for basic etiquette in website design and content that apply to everything from Joe’s Vacation Journal Wiki to Giganto Corporate Wiki. I’ll just list them first before discussing them in more detail:
Continue reading “Tip of the Week #18: 5 Rules of Net Etiquette”
PBwiki is going down in history. Namely, PBwiki will be included in a book tentatively titled, “The Teacher’s Guide to Teaching History with Technology: A Handbook for Teachers, by Teachers” by Justin Reich and Tom Daccord of the Center for Teaching History with Technology.
The book, to be published by M.E. Sharpe, has an anticipated publishing date of sometime in Spring, 2008.
On hearing this news Peebers the Undeniable Robot of History ®, a bit of a history buff, clanged his enormous iron feet onto his hassock, clenched his half-bent billiard between his two rows of frighteningly regular enamel teeth and sighed with satisfaction.
–Curt
We’ve had a few people e-mail us with questions regarding the privacy and security of PBwiki. Is PBwiki secure? Is it managed by a 3rd party? Are PBwiki servers sitting in some guys living room or running at an appropriate colocation center?
In an e-mail written to one of our users, our master chief, David Weekly answered the questions above:
Our servers are in a 24/7 guarded facility in an earthquake-proofed building in San Francisco, behind several layers of locked, sealed, access-controlled portals. The servers are owned and operated exclusively by a select handful of our staff, who have had checks performed on them and have signed a strict zero information disclosure policy document. We do not use third parties to manage our servers.
The servers are secured with a custom-hardened version of the Linux kernel, with a hand-tuned per-server lockdown of services and custom assembled IP firewall rules to only permit legitimate traffic. We have many companies and organizations keeping some of their most confidential data with us; if they kept it on their own shared drives at their office, there would be a significantly higher chance of exposure from a break-in.
Yep, PBwiki is secure.
Sometimes you might be inclined to look at your address bar and wonder what PBwiki is up to. What’s all this “?edit=1” and “?raw=1” nonsense you see hanging off the end of your wiki names? More importantly, can YOU do anything interesting with them?
Well, of course the answer is yes, they can be useful to you; otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this entry. Each of those examples represents parameters that are passed to PBwiki so that the computers on their end can know what page to fetch and send back to you. For a non-PBwiki example, when you do a search in Google, the search term is included in the address of the next page you request, and that information is used by Google’s servers to search their database for your information.
Similarly, when “?edit=1” is set on PBwiki, it says “send me the edit-mode version of this page.” You can use parameters like this one to help make navigating your site easier…
Continue reading “Tip of the Week #17: URL Parameters and You”
PBwiki’s mascot, Peebers the Unstoppable Robot of Collaboration (SM), is clanking his way through the august halls of the United Nations today, pressing the flesh and helping to create global corporate accord.
The UN’s Global Compact is devoted to creating an opt-in organization for corporations who wish to be good citizens. The Global Compact is collaboratively creating a governing policy document that outlines the responsibilities of businesses in our increasingly inter-connected world. They have also recently announced the “Communications on Progress.” This is an initiative to collaboratively review the would-be participants for transparency and accountability in terms of the developing standards of the organization.
To our giddy delight (Peebers positively squealed and skipped when he found out, terrifying several members of the the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean who were standing nearby), the Global Compact Office chose PBwiki to provide the platform for the collaborations. We’re helping them discover the best way to use wikis in the service of their goals. This is important, as 4,000 companies and 700 organizations from over 100 countries are involved.
Jeff Senne, Communications on Progress Manager for the GC said this:
“PBwiki has been very helpful to us in designing and maintaining an interactive space for content distribution and data capture.”
Nice, right?
I think this is a further indicator that wikis are being embraced as powerful tools by the world at large, in this case, by the global policy-making community. My personal opinion (just mine, please note; doesn’t constitute any kind of endorsement) is that the UN’s focus on dialogue and collaboration dovetails nicely with wikis in general and PBwiki in particular.
For more information, read our press release on PBwiki’s partnership with the United Nations.
Also, see the post by Jürgen, one of the UNers in charge of the project. Here’s the UN’s press release on one of the elements of the Global Compact that uses PBwiki. And, here’s a nice write up on the project by the Bivings Report
–Curt
PBworks Official Blog 