The Buzz

A StikiPad user of ours had a really neat idea for an implementation of Google Maps, so we've spent the last week or so hashing things out on how we can easily integrate them into StikiPad. It's been a test of our patience for sure, but we've tried to make things as simple as possible for linking it in.

Although, we have to admit, it's looking nice, and damn it's handy.

We'll be throwing this out to you beta users in the next week or so.. if you're not on the list already, let us know (feedback at stikipad dot com) with your subdomain and/or username!

Some of you may know that I travelled down to Kansas last week to meet with Jonathan and to solidify some things with StikiPad that we'd been talking about for a long time. Aside from my flight getting cancelled and therefore being stuck in Chicago due to a big snowstorm, it was a very productive trip. We implemented a bunch of UI changes and brainstormed some new features in the process. And I suppose we had a bit of fun too (check out the photos!).

Our new server came in last weekend and we migrated all StikiPad users over on Sunday - we had a few issues but those were corrected within the hour that we switched things over. Other than that, the machine is working perfectly and we're quite happy with the performance thus far.

We've been pushing forward to move out of private beta soon. Our private beta users have been the best, and we can't thank them enough for keeping us on our toes throughout the past 6 weeks. Special thanks to those who keep giving us feedback - it's invaluable!

We'll have more announcements in the next few days about where we're going. Until then, from Jonathan and myself, Happy Holidays!

We started off by making page discussions and author lists a bit more sociable with the addition of author photos and a few pieces of other information. Along with the new discussion page comes a site-wide RSS feed of discussions. Just check the Syndicate link inside your wiki!

I'm a fan of well-placed DHTML, but we've put off adding any visual effects beyond hiding and showing a few divs -- until now! Check out the effects when hiding/showing the markup tips, or anywhere inside the administration interface that has 'Hide'/'Show' links!

Tired of having to grab for the mouse, we went ahead and added keyboard shortcuts for most of your basic functions. Essentially we've created a nice smooth workflow for editing a page.

Next up comes WYSIWYG support back into StikiPad, using the cool FCKEditor. We're still going to default to Textile though, since it doesn't work in Safari.

Last but not least, we've began slowly introducing some new StikiMarkup, so be sure to check it out!

One thing I've never really been fond of is FAQ pages - I mean, how impersonable can you get? But alas, having the same questions over and over again gets you to a point where you have to bite the bullet and write it down for future reference (and also for everyone's sanity - who wants to wait to have an e-mail reply when the answer can be right there). So, behold the brand new Frequently Asked Questions section of our Knowledge Base.

Also, another section to point out is the Forums. We encourage everyone to signup and post your thoughts over there. Or, if you're feeling a little bashful, feel free to contact us any other way.

I've been answering a bunch of e-mails from users lately and we're ecstastic about the response we've been getting about StikiPad. You're excited, we're excited! Also, we want to show that by launching some new features over the next few days.. which, you know.. might be why we've scheduled a few minutes of downtime for tonight.

We've been working our butts off for the past few months to make something that's we're proud of, and we're just about ready to share it with you.

You see, we're the type of guys who are commonly called geeks, but we completely deny that label much like many geek generations before us. We had a vision of wiki software that didn't have to be completely complicated - we wanted, after all, to be able to have a place to collaborate on projects without worrying about the limitations that the current software provided.

Enter StikiPad. A name we came up with on a whim and we loved so much we decided to run with it. Over the past two months, we've really sat down and tried to figure out how we can make StikiPad better. Basically, most of our ideas came out of using the software for our own personal sites - I shared some martini recipes I acquired with friends, Jonathan kept track of his dates with the ladies. And yet, you think I'm joking.

We're ready to launch into the first-round of our *official* private beta program. That being said, and if you're reading this, chances are you've been selected to be a part of it. We welcome you to use StikiPad and to try out everything and see how it fits into your everyday life - we challenge you to find new uses and help develop a system that's going to make collaborating on the web a whole lot easier.

Bug Fixes

During the day I always keep a running copy of our logging software in the background so that I can watch for any exceptions (crashes) that occur. Since we have users in Japan, Sweden and Germany, I also go back through the previous nights log file each morning. I've seen one recurring bug continue to pop up over and over again until I finally swatted it a few minutes ago. It dealt with naming pages using [[Double Brackets]] and "special" characters (#&%(!-+)). It was an odd bug and fairly hard to track down, since it would only occasionally cause an exception to be reported, but always displayed an error message to the end user. I've never been a big fan of writing test suites, simply because I'm a "get it done right away" type of person. However, this is one case where tests pinpointed and helped to solve the issue. It will also make sure it doesn't happen again. Chalk one up for test driven development.

Along those lines... there were nearly 30 changes to the application over the last week that are all now live. Enhanced stability, features and bug fixes!

E-mail to Wiki (ActionMail)

(*rant*) This one has been a long time coming. We've had it ready for nearly two weeks, but thanks to a weird issue with qmail (which we were never able to resolve), rollout just happened a few minutes ago. Spending a huge amount of time debugging and learning about qmail certainly was not my idea of a fun time, especially when there are professionals to do that for you. Since we're bootstrapping this company though, hiring a "professional" for system administration just isn't in the budget yet. Taking a page out of our playbook, we cut our losses and bit the bullet last night to spend another 6 hours installing and configuring Postfix. (*end of rant*)

It was worth it.

Each wiki has a randomly generated private e-mail address that is shown only to authors of that wiki. We chose this model rather than using permissions based security because of the inherent complexity in maintaining a list of e-mail addresses you can update from. We are serial entrepreneurs and have quite a few e-mail addresses that to check and send mail from depending on what I'm doing, and I really didn't want to have to repeat myself each time I start to use another address. "Do Not Repeat Yourself" (DNRY) is super important in anything that you are doing.

To discover what this magical e-mail address is, click the "E-mail" link on the right hand side of the page. At the very bottom, you should now see "Use e-mail to update this page: click here". Personally I added the e-mail address to my contact book and use that to quickly update my wikis. If you come up with any other good solutions, let me know!

E-mail Commands (This must be the first word in the subject line):

Sometimes when you're so busy doing so many different things you feel like you've done absolutely nothing. And if you feel you've done nothing, then there's obviously no sense in writing about the nothing that's been going on. Vicious cycle.

Things have been insanely busy for me. On a personal level I'm wrapping up my Business degree (10 days, good lord) which will allow me to focus all of my energy on StikiPad. Finally.

Jonathan has been busy optimizing code and handling some additional feature requests that have been coming in from the Private Beta crowd. We're looking forward to opening up StikiPad to more people in the coming weeks. If you're interested, remember to signup to our notification list at the main site.

As for those in Private Beta, we remind you once again to not publicly share specific information about StikiPad just yet. Trust you me, the time is coming.. patience, my friends, patience.

It's an exciting time as we get this rolling, that's for sure!