The Buzz

One of our users posed a question to us the other day asking how they could automate backups of their wiki. Using our REST API to handle authentication, we figured out that the following command-line snippet provides a handy way to download the latest export of your wiki!

wget --http-user=email@address.com \
--http-password=yourpassword \
--header="Accept: application/xml" \
-O sp-backup.zip \
http://account.stikipad.com/wikiname/export_markup

Just copy and paste, fill in the values for your e-mail address, password, StikiPad URL and you're set!

I know, I know, I promised to enlighten the masses on Monday, but we simply couldn't sit on our hands long enough to finalize some features and make this list.. until now!

Alas, here's a taste of some new things that have been deployed as of the past few weeks:

• Publicly share pages from private wikis (beta only for now, you lucky testers you!)
• Dynamic Table of Contents generator added as an option.
• Comments can once again be added to author invitations (back by popular demand!)
• Comments can be enabled on a page rather than within the separate discuss section (check your wiki configuration screen)
• Question marks are now allowed as page names.
• More AJAX goodness in showing page changes.

And while the rest of the world fights off the sniffles (a Canadian winter is not something to look forward to, trust me) we're trying to fight off little bugs that show their annoying heads here and there. Here's a run down of what we've taken the Raid can to over the past few weeks:

• Further domain mapping transparency.
• Exporting is now playing nicer in downloaded files.
• Handy searching fixed under classic template.
• Fixed the 'cancel' link when editing a mobile template.

Splat! Feels good, doesn't it? We're up to much more behind the scenes and hope to be able to share it soon. And, if you're looking to try out some new features available exclusively to beta users, feel free to drop us an e-mail (feedback at the stikipad dots com)!

Stay tuned!

In case you haven't noticed, our features page has been getting more and more additions as the months roll on. But no worries, we'll simply have to redesign that page as there's still more in the works.

Google Maps
Got a Google API key? Got a StikiPad? Perfect! After all, it's a match made in wiki heaven! Adding a map to your StikiPad works almost like linking to a page.

[[1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20500:address]] Displays a map for the specified address at the default map size.

[[1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20500@300x580]]
Displays a map similar to the one above, but at a size of 300 by 580 pixels.

Just remember, you'll need to input your Google Maps API key in the Configuration section of your StikiPad. It's under the Google Maps section (imagine that)!

More information on some other new features tomorrow..

Get out your dancing shoes, we've released some new features that will have you two-steppin' up a storm.

Performance improvements.

Like we mentioned a bit ago, there's been a significant change in how the StikiPad engine works to put your pages together. We've cut the codebase in half (no kidding!) and have really refined our methods. Although you won't notice a big change (aside from some things below), this lets us do some neat things in the future.

Author notifications.

We're introducing changes to the way we handle notifications - administrators still have access to notifications via E-mail or IM, and we've changed things so now authors of any paid account can setup their own notifications as well. Also, the Notifications section has been moved out of My.StikiPad and is now directly in the authors section of any of your wikis.

Revision address changes.

Another house cleaning issue, but we've taken the ugly URL away to changes in favour of a nicer one. For example, http://support.stikipad.com/kb/revision/HomePage?rev=1 is now http://support.stikipad.com/kb/revision/show/1/HomePage. Backwards compatibility is still there for search engines, but moving forward all URLs will be generated using the new method. Why'd we change this? Well it's simple really -- beauty counts. Even in URLs.

Further international characters improvements.

A few months ago we introduced some changes to be better able to handle international characters but it's always been a problem with these characters within some of the JavaScript that drives the site. Well, that's no longer as we've gone deep into the StikiPad Labs and worked out some solutions.

More customization for templates.

We've added ID's to each of the navigation list items in the Edit toolbar - using if statements within a custom template will let you restrict any of these items from anyone you don't want to view them. We've also added another variable to the page_attr array, that will let you display the number of discussions for that particular page. This has been added to the default templates, but if you've customized yours you'll just want to add: {{ page_attr.discuss_count }} to your template.

What we have in beta...

So traditionally we've kept things under wraps until we were ready to release them. This worked for and against us, but we're tired of the occasionally long development cycles and not showing our work until we felt it was ready.

We've decided to toss that all aside. If you'd like to try out things before others have access to them, just send us an email (feedback at stikipad.com) and we'll turn on the beta flag for your account and send you the details on how to get at the goods.

As of right now, this is what we have cooking:

Multiple administrators.

This was a big feature request over the past few months that we've been playing with internally for a few weeks now. You can add an author as administrator and they will have full access to change the wiki's settings, just like the account holder does. This also allows the new administrator to have access to the templates, deleting pages -- whatever you could do before as an account holder, but only for that particular wiki.

REST API

We started this one nearly two months ago, but ended up scrapping the first version. It just wasn't good enough. As part of the performance improvements/basic rewrite of the entire backend, we built it in and this time it plain rocks. The downside? No documentation, yet! We have a list of basic examples using cURL but nothing beyond that. Feeling adventurous? Send an email and we'll give you what we have so far!

Mobile StikiPad

Yet another item we've had on the burner for awhile, yet never felt right. After a bit of inspiration and a solid chunk of free time yesterday, we built a mobile interface in about 9 hours. Yeah. 9 hours. Break out the tiki torches, take a seat on the back porch and use StikiPad from your phone. Talk about sweet!

And if this isn't enough, we've got some more things up our sleeve... stay tuned!

Well, it's been a while since we've posted and that's because we've been eagerly going through a lot of changes behind the scenes. It's rude not to bring your friends up to speed on your life, so here's ours, in a nutshell.

New features coming soon.
We're just about ready to unveil two new features to StikiPad - one that's pretty small (but has been asked for a lot), and one that's pretty big. With the latter it opens up the door for a whole slew of things that we've been thinking about but haven't yet gotten around to. We're excited about them and will be making an announcement in the next few days.

New tour
Our new tour has been given a fresh coat of paint and is ready to show you what StikiPad is all about. Gone are the days of wordy explanations which have been replaced in favour of some screenshots that show you StikiPad in action.

Application restructuring
Paul Graham said it best about how first versions of software are just that - first versions:

Another group was worried when they realized they had to rewrite their software from scratch. I told them it would be a bad sign if they didn't. The main function of your initial version is to be rewritten.

Although there has not been a noticeable change in how StikiPad operates, there has been a slew of work done on our backend in order to prepare it for the next phase of development. Although we haven't completely re-written the application, there's been a significant amount of changes that proved to be quite time consuming. Alas, it's done and we're ready to move onto things that you will notice. Rest assured, your feature requests haven't fallen on deaf ears.

The Kansas chronicles, part two.
Yes, that's right, the rumours you've heard are true - this Canadian is south of the border battling Internet Explorer and dodging tornadoes. We're still getting settled but have some exciting things lined up within the next month that include a few things you might be interested in.

Take a look at our Flickr photostream for our latest antics.. maybe even a sneak peak into some things in development (aren't whiteboards dandy?).

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!).

It's taken a bit longer than we expected, but we're proud to announce the first major revision since we launched. We've been working away and have a ton of new features and fixes in this release, so how about a brief overview?

Free Account Changes: Again? Yes! We're doing away with the 5 page limitation and adding 30Mb of storage space. On top of that, bandwidth has been pushed up from 50Mb to 500Mb - now go out and build something cool!

Paid Account Changes: For our awesome customers we've also bumped your storage space to 150Mb (Personal), 500 Mb (Power), and 1Gb (Team). And, since we're on a roll, we're increasing allocated bandwidth to 1Gb (Personal), 2 Gb (Power), and 5 Gb (Team).

New Templates: After weeks of work, we're ready to introduce our second official StikiPad template, available in three color schemes! Of course, since we built it entirely using Liquid, you can duplicate any of the templates and use those as a starting point for your master creation.

Improved Domain Mapping: For Power accounts using our nifty mapped domains feature, we're pleased to give you what we are calling "soft" domain mapping. This allows backwards compatibility with previously hosted Instiki users that will let you retain your incoming search engine links by "softly" redirecting any page request from http://wiki.example.com/show/HomePage to http://wiki.example.com/mapped_wiki/show/HomePage. This also leads to being able to just type http://wiki.example.com and then having the user redirected to http://wiki.example.com/mapped_wiki/show/HomePage. Neat, eh?

Syntax Highlighting: For the developers among us, code syntax highlighting now joins our StikiMarkup, enabling beautification of Ruby and Yaml using a simple tag:


# ruby code here 

International Users: Last but not least, we had a few nefarious issues with international characters and wiki words, which is now fixed!

Wow, what an update! But, we're hardly near the end of our ideas. On deck next: StikiOps - our API, importing, an overhaul of the search engine and spell checking. And, if you have any other ideas, let us know what you'd like to see!

Building StikiPad has been a learning process from the beginning, and as much as we think we’re doing things right sometimes we miss the target. We've read blog posts and e-mails, and we've talked to you every chance we've gotten and realize that although we didn't feel the free account was too limiting when we devised our plans, you told us it was. Essentially, we underestimated what you needed, and after much debate we’ve decided to change our free account to give you more freedom.

Effectively immediately, any StikiPad Free plan will have the following account specifics:

• Public or Private wikis (Changed from Authors Only or Private)
• Unlimited Revisions (Changed from 5 revisions)
• Maximum 5 Pages (Changed from 5 revisions)
• Maximum 3 Tasklists (Changed from just one)

We thank each and every one of you that posted feedback about our Free account (whether good, or bad) - we appreciate it, and we promise to keep our ears open for the future.

We've also been working on two things that we're planning on launching quite shortly, and we're excited to get those into your hands so you can start using them. It's a belated Valentine's Day gift that's going to impact both Free and Paid accounts - we know you're going to love it!