wikidot.com development blog

This blog has been moved!

2008-11-28T01:08:00.000-08:00

This blog has been discontinued. If you are interested in following the Wikidot development, please look at Wikidot.com, or look at our blogs listed here, or jump to my new blog right now!

Thanks for reading

Michal Frackowiak

Localization efforts starting

2006-08-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

So far the tests are running fine. Several bugs have been found and a few missing features have been implemented. It all just looks like it works ;-)

A few days ago a new sub-project has started: localization. The first targeted language will be Polish. Now you can easily choose the Polish template (the "fresh site") and several buttons and interface elements are now in Polish too.

I hope this will go on.

Watch this blog! The Wikidot.com project will start really soon!!! ;-)

Wikidot.com public tests begin ;-)

2006-08-04T02:06:00.000-07:00

Hi there!

It has been quite here for some time but just because of one simple reason - I have been concentrating on development of the wikidot.com service. And the results are here:

http://www.wikidot.com

We are open for tests now. Unfortunately creating the sites is per-invitation at the moment but this will change soon. There are a few quite cool features one should check out.

And if anyone has an idea for an interesting site - I can give the "site creation code" without a problem.

Ok, back to work ;-)

Web 2.0 bubble articles

2006-06-06T01:42:00.000-07:00

Today I have fond 2 interesting articles about "Web 2.0" revenue model and future. Here are the links:

A VC's View of Web 2.0
Crash of Web 2.0 Titans.

The first one is certainly worth reading. It is a bit pessimistic though.

But one should certainly agree to a few things:
1. "Web 2.0" buzzword attracts capitalists.
2. Many of the Web 2.0 companies do not have a good revenue model.
3. Startup costs today are _low_ and assuming a good revenue model in many cases there is no need for 1 000 000s$ investments.
4. Companies that will survive will certainly have very low running costs or be part of large companies with financial backup. It seems unlikely for some companies that received millions of $$ to work it out.
5. The positive is that the current investments are much much lower that these from 90's. Investors are much more aware and because of low running costs it might work out in many cases.

To return to our own project - we do not want to rely on any VC capital. Our model assumes self-financing with some investments from the FFF sector (Friends, Family and Fools). The initial development cost is really low here in Poland (that is also why I often tell people about software outsourcing in Poland).

Today you can have a dedicated servers for as low as $70 per month (for initial phase. full rack collocation is the next phase). The programmer's salary in Poland could be much lower than in US or any other western country. Local costs are also much much lower (office + logistics).

I will certainly cover possibilities of software development outsourcing in Poland in a dedicated post someday because I think it is worth it.

best regards - Michal

A busy week

2006-05-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a busy week with the project so I had very little time to blog. But just to summarize the work:

The project rapidly moves towards the feature-complete preview. This week I have implemented per-page discussions, improved attachments handling (i.e. file moving, renaming etc.), better "my account" handling and site configuration. The templates system is almost polished (i.e. different starting templates for new pages). Autocomplete widget has been placed in several places to improve text input.

What is quite innovative at this point is the wiki editor itself. After some considerations I have decided to keep away from all the WYSIWYG inventions and concentrate on building an editor around "just" the textarea element. Well, a "bit" overloaded textarea with "code assistant" that closes block-level tags, helps with list handling, inserts bold, italic etc.

At the moment almost all the syntax is available from the toolbar. Several wizards are also available (e.g. image wizard that allows flickr image insertion, URL validation, positioning etc... or equation reference wizard that looks for all labeled equations in the text).

Much has been done and clearly one can see the end.

I have also fixed a bug in yahoo ui library and implemented a new feature too. I hope this will find its place in the next release. The details are here and here. I am really glad the development of wikidot has a time coincidence with the releases of the yahoo ui library. A great tool that saves a lot of time.

During the last meeting I have presented the project to a few friends from the Torun Linux User Group. Well, they did like it ;-)

One last thing: there is a conference devoted to Web 2.0 (whatever this is) in Warsaw I will most likely attend looking for investment possibilities.
http://firma.biznesnet.pl/view/287
Anyone to meet there?

regards - michal

a screenshot and a photo

2006-05-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

Today was quite a hard working day with implementing autocomplete from YahooUI library, fixing forums and improving the permission system.
But is works very well now where it should. Anyway - here is a first screenshot of what you can expect from wikidot:

This is a preview only with the simplest (temporary) graphical theme. In the final version there will be several themes available + custom css themes to create.

The good thing is that everything on the screen is customizable. Menus on the left, pull-down menus at the top, layout can be changed via css styles. Moreover every category can have a different layout, theme and even content license. Also on-site account creation and login, joining sites, math editor are there by default... Well, there are so many goodies I will only mention that it is also possible to embed videos from YouTube and Google Video, put RSS/Atom feeds on the page, put comment box on the page, take photos and whole sets from Flickr...

I am really glad the first stage of development is almost over and the project slowly starts to see the daylight.

Last time I have mentioned the "garage production" using open source software. So here is a photo of the main wikidot.com development center. No more than a desk, 2 computers, printer, large paper sheets for diagrams and notes and... an always-disturbing young lady watching Winnie The Pooh ;-)

best regards

Michal

Open source drives web 2.0 boom

2006-05-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

With the recent interest of venture capitalists in the web companies (e.g. read here, there was one much better article on forbes but I do not recall the URL... In fact there is a lot of info on the web) it is clear they are looking for revenues from so called "Web 2.0" internet - projects that involve online communities on the scale not seen before.

Take for example digg.com - 4m$ in investments, youtube.com - 11m$, wikia.com - 4m$ and many others. The total investments go in hundreds billions of dollars and in the next year or two it will be clear if Web 2.0 = "web revolution" or Web 2.0 = "another web bubble".

Anyway people say it is going to be different now and the mistakes of 90's will not be repeated.

In fact I did not want to talk about economical aspects of the web, but rather about software and tools. What in 90's you had to buy for thousands dollars today open source world offers for free and with the quality it is sometimes difficult to find in the commercial products.

The wikdot.com budget states 0.00 $ (zero dollars) for the software. All the development is done using Linux + eclipse + apache software + PHP + postgresql + tons of other free software. The whole list would make it too long to mention here but for sure it will appear on the final "credits" page of the project. It is not really amazing that the software is free - one can find a lot of free soft out there - but the quality is what matters. I could not find anything better that eclipse for IDE, apache httpd for a web server. Postgresql is an awesome database - IMHO the best of the open-source ones. Although not much feature-rich as Oracle, but who can afford Oracle ;-)

For production servers there is also 0.00 $. The final farm will run on Linux boxes probably with the Ultra Monkey-related software for high reliability.

In this context it may appear true that (and this is the conclusion of this post)

you can build great professional software with ZERO software costs!!!

And this is great. Not just because you "save money". This is great because "zero software costs" gives a big opportunity for people with great ideas and not necessarily with big wallets.

At some level the price is not the only factor that matters. I am talking about programming libraries. In the last 10 years the number of open source code has increased enormously. In PHP which we use we can find tons of software we use in our projects - just to mention PEAR packages or Smarty template engine. As for JavaScript there are tons of good libraries - e.g. the recent YahooUI, Prototype, MooFX and many others. Using them you save a lot of effort and time.

To conclude for now - the "garage develpment" times are back. They are back as never before.

watch us ;-)

Michal

BTW: Ok, I have lied a bit. We need a copy of Windows to ensure wikidot works with "the most popular browser". But this came bundled with one of the laptops ;-)

wiki boom?

2006-05-15T03:21:00.000-07:00

Since last year A LOT has changed in the wiki world. Not only wikipedia became one of the most complete information sources on the planet, but people are starting using wikis in a very different way.

Also check trends with google trends for wikipedia and wiki.

But the wiki farm concept is not new et all. The first wiki farm, wikia (service also known as wikicities) started in 2005 and received ~4m$ in venture capital.

Today the most popular wiki farms are: jotspot, pbwiki, wikia, wikispaces, schtuff. And the market growth IS impressive as can be seen on the graph below:

And the scale is just one year!

The services above offer a very wide range of options from simplest wikis (wikispaces) to advanced (wikia, based on MediaWiki) or JotSpot (independent wiki engine + lots of applications).

Wikia is absolutely free and ads-supported. The same goes for wikispaces. All the other offer limited functionality in the free version and monthly fees go even for $180 per month (JotSpot).

PBwiki is claimed to be the largest wiki farm with 70,000+ sites hosted. But most of them are test sites and dead sites that do not get any traffic.

wikidot.com?

I am quite sure we can still go for the wiki boom although existing wiki farms offer a wide range of solutions. Wikidot will be a bit different from others - it will not only offer "page creation", but "site creation" with realy many features offered for free.

Watch this blog! ;-)

Michal

wikidot official blog started!

2006-05-14T06:36:00.000-07:00

Today I have decided it is a time to start the official blog dedicated to wikibox.com development. What is wikidot? In simple words - it is a wiki farm that will offer users free wiki sites hosting - not only pages, but whole sites with discussion forums, integrable with online photo sharing services, easily integrable with blogs and anything else that provides rss/atom feeds.

The development of wikidot started about one year ago. The design principles were to benefit from new web technologies (buzzwords) such as AJAX.

Our temporary site gives the following goals of the wikidot initiative:

free wiki spaces hosted on our servers
Web 2.0 style with AJAX patterns
ultimate customization of sites
discussion fora
pluggable architecture allowing integration with other services, e.g. flickr, blog services, rss and atom feeds
promoting copyleft content licenses
release code under LGPL license

We expect the first tech preview to start as early as May/June 2006. Public beta will be available soon after a period of testing.

The roadmap assumes the final release in July/August 2006. Get ready and watch this blog since it will also include a lot about technical details of modern "Web 2.0" site design, programming tools, web environment, server hardware etc.

all best 4 you!

Michal Frackowiak,
main architect and programmer of wikidot.com platform