The Buzz

I just rolled out our new forums, now available at http://forum.stikipad.com.

The old forums were taken over by spammers and, well, just weren't that great to work with.

RSS feeds! Rejoice! :-)

Author: jonathan
Date: 2006-07-19 19:47:39 -0500 (Wed, 19 Jul 2006)
New Revision: 666

That's 666 revisions of the StikiPad code, all for you.. not because we can, but because we love you so.

Multiple things have caught our attention in the past few weeks and we've had to hold off on the new features while getting things better organized internally. We'll have some announcements soon about where we're at, where we're going, and how we're planning to get there.

Rest assured, friends, new features are coming very soon.. we promise. :)

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?).

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.

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!

All quiet on the Western front? On our blog, perhaps.. in actuality, I think not.

We launched a little over 2 weeks ago and have had an absolutely amazing response. It's an absolute treat to wakeup each day with no idea how it's going to end (aside from pure exhaustion, which I'm pretty sure has become such a commonality between Jonathan and myself it feels normal).

Boy oh boy have we been busy plugging away at the StikiPad engine after receiving a bunch of feedback. Our forums are becoming busier with activity, we've had some fantastic ideas for some new things we'll be launching in the coming week, and we're hearing about some pretty fantastic uses for StikiPad. More on all of these later when we can sit down and have a pow-wow.

Also, we're officially putting the word out to StikiPad users who wouldn't mind beta testing some new features we'll be rolling out in the future. If you're interested, send an e-mail to feedback at stikipad dot com.

And finally, we can't forget our dear StikiPad's 1st birthday which was officially on February 2nd. That's when the idea for StikiPad was born, and it's hard to believe it's been over a year we've been building on that initial inspiration. But, lets all raise our glasses and cheers to another fantastic year!

At 5pm CDT this evening we threw off the veil of secrecy and opened up StikiPad for signups to the public. Since then we've been busy bees watching the system and having a celebratory drink. Lots of months of hard work, and we're quite proud of what we've accomplished.

Special thanks to all of our beta testers for their patience throughout the private beta and an even bigger thanks to those who e-mailed us with a comment, suggestion or question - your feedback has driven us in ways you can't imagine.

And we'll let the rest speak for itself - go signup!

So, you may have already noticed that the script.aculo.us wiki made the switch over to StikiPad engine a few weeks back. The script.aculo.us wiki hosts all the demos and documentation for the AJAX effects that are included in such projects as Ruby on Rails. Since StikiPad is written in Rails, we use the script.aculo.us effects throughout to help deliver information to you. It's been great to work with Thomas over the past few weeks - we greatly appreciate all the hard work he and his team have done for the Rails community (and it's an honour to have them using StikiPad)!

On a complete aside, having recently made the transition from Windows -> Mac one of the greatest features that I use daily is the automatic spell checking that's performed throughout OS X. For example, see honour up there - yea, that should be honor. And colour? Yea, should be color. You can take the boy out of Canada, but you can't take the Canadian out of the boy. Right, eh?

When transferring this blog over to the new system I decided to enable some old posts that we had from back when we first started StikiPad. I thought I'd explain these posts from waaay back, just in case you were wondering.

You'll notice that we've been involved with StikiPad since February 2005 when Jonathan first had the idea. We got the foundation of StikiPad in place, and then took a much needed break for the both of us (I just finishing my degree, Jonathan moving to another city). With a big break during the summer months where we both took some time to relax, we decided to complete the project we both loved from the beginning sometime in October. Some of the posts from that time include features that we've since fine-tuned or redone completely. Some of them aren't active (i.e. E-mail -> Wiki) just yet due to some issues we've been having, but we haven't forgotten about them!

As of what's happening right now, we're putting the final touches on the tail end of our private beta program that's been running for two or so months. During this time we've been refining our processes, both technical and business-related to get everything ready for launch. In terms of marketing material, we put up a temporary site with a notification list for those who were interested. The response has been outstanding (and keeps growing everyday!).

Matt and I first met on IRC in late 1998, early 1999 while we were both still in high school. At the time we were young and full of idealism. Okay, so maybe we still are. Anyways, both of us seemed to pick up on the idea that we were actually going to do something with our lives, and from that point forward we've been pretty good friends. We have a unique relationship in that we've never met in "real life", have only spoken on the phone a handful of times, yet we've cultivated a close friendship and professional relationship.

Since we first met, we've always pitched ideas back and forth to each other. One of the best parts about our friendship is that we're not afraid to let the other person know when they've come up with a dumb idea. Over the years we've both shot down a number of various entrepreneurial ventures, but I believe we've finally hit on one that has more potential than any of our previous ones.

On February 2nd, between 2 and 3 A.M. I came up with the idea for StikiPad. I scrambled to find my wallet, pulled out my credit card and registered the domain about 30 seconds after that initial flash of inspiration. I couldn't wait for Matt to wake up so I could pitch the idea and didn't even go to bed that morning out of pure excitement. Matt finally woke up and popped online, I quickly pitched the idea and got a thumbs up... then I went and promptly fell asleep.

You know you've got a good chance at succeeding when each morning you wake up and you're more excited than the day before about what you're creating. Since the private beta started, the feedback we've received has simply been amazing. It's absolutely awesome to learn how each of our clients are using StikiPad, because everyone seems to use it differently. The notion of building a tool with as little structure as possible opens up a world of creativity for anyone that uses it.

So from the idea on February 2nd, to the first private beta on February 23rd, we've finally opened up Everything! StikiPad (now known as The Buzz. Hopefully we'll both look back on this post someday to see where we started from, and wonder where we'll go next.