The Buzz

I admit it. The concept of a wiki can be tough to grasp sometimes.

If you saw the initial version of our website, we never used the word wiki. Finally, right before we launched, we decided to add the "Your personal wiki, at your service." tag to our homepage. Since then, it now appears approximately 4 times on the homepage. We made the decision to go ahead and use the word "wiki" because we knew our initial users would be the early adopters already familiar with wikis.

In fact, we've been refining our "elevator pitch" for months. Being from small towns in fairly rural areas, it's still a challenge to explain just what it is that our products do. Unless you're "up" on what a wiki is, or even what can be done with the Internet, "wiki" just sounds like something you stick in your backyard to burn and keep the mosquitos away at night.

While talking to our existing users and potential users, one of the recurring things we've seen is a "moment of clarity" with wikis. In other words, it either clicks immediately or it doesn't. Even then, you can't be quite sure that you really did get your point across. Perception and all that jazz.

With that in mind, Matt has been working hard lately and just wrapped up two awesome screencasts with audio!

Find out how to efficiently use StikiPad over at our newly released Theatre. We'll be continuing to produce these short screencasts, not only as a way for you to familiarize yourself with StikiPad, but also as short introductions that your authors can use to understand how a wiki works.

We've been doing a number of interviews around town in the past few weeks and thought that maybe some of our users would like to get to know a bit more about us.

Earlier this month we did an interview with Brad over at Stranova, a bi-weekly business strategy podcast. You can download the podcast here, and be sure to check out Stranova for some other great interviews (and, for the record, I don't normally sound like Sean Connery like I do in that interview - damn microphone!).

Also, Ken over at One Degree was kind enough to post our 5 question interview earlier today. You can read the whole interview here and take a look at other companies that have been interviewed in the 5 questions section of One Degree.

If yourself or someone you know would like some questions answered by us, feel free to e-mail us and give us a heads-up - help spread the word about StikiPad!

After running through a few of the bigger items on our task list over the last week, we took a bit of time to give our tagging capabilities a nice overhaul with the addition of tag clouds as an easy way to figure out what tags you've already used on other pages. Click on the 'View existing tags' link and you will be presented with:

Simply click on the tag and it's magically added to the tag list!

Then on Thursday, Matt said "Hey, a user is interested in having auto-saving drafts," to which I replied "sounds cool, lets do it!" A few hours later we had the first version of drafts out for testing.

A few notes about drafts:

• Your draft is created for you automatically, every 10 seconds after you begin typing.
• Your draft is deleted when you Save a page.
• Your draft is kept if you choose the 'Cancel' link on the edit screen.

So that's drafts. A simple way of making sure you never lose your work. See it in action here (, 1mb).

We're always trying to save a couple bucks here and there so we thought you might be in the same boat. Not only did we release new features today but we also implemented prepaid options for your StikiPad account. Full details are available on our features page, but here's the important bits.

Half-year Prepaid
Personal: $24.75
Power User: $49.75
Team: $74.75

All half-year prepaid accounts include 1 month free!

Yearly Prepaid
Personal: $49.50
Power User: $99.50
Team: $149.50

All yearly prepaid accounts include 2 months free!

As always, payment options can be changed at any time in My.StikiPad.

In our continued quest for making the best damn wiki software available, we've rolled out two of our most requested features to date: WYSIWYG editing and some Task List enhancements.

WYSIWYG Editing
We told you it was coming and low and behold, it's finally here. The choice to use Textile, Markdown or the WYSIWYG editor are available on a per-wiki basis by visiting the Configuration page of your StikiPad and going into the advanced options. However, due to Safari issues our Mac lovers (us included) will not have access to the editor. But, as soon as development on Safari makes it happen, you bet we'll be implementing it on StikiPad.

Task Lists
A few adjustments to the appearance of task lists should make things easier to get around. We've dropped the icons to reorder and to view detailed information in favour of text links. Also, no more unsightly delete icons around your lists, they're hidden until you need them. Editing the name of your task list has also been given a face lift - just move your mouse over the title and click to change (oh AJAX, you're so sweet to us).

And also, the response for our new free account has been amazing - thanks to everyone who's signed up and especially those who have sent us such kind words. We're flattered (no really.. we are!).