Archived Wiki News:
2013-02-26 DavisWiki.org and other sites on our server experienced many hours of downtime today. Things should be back to normal now. Technical details here.
2012-12-16 We experienced a few hours of downtime this morning and yesterday morning. Currently investigating possible causes.
2011-12-09 We experienced approximately 2 hours of unexpected server downtime. Things should be back up now. Currently investigating possible causes. And thanks go to Ken for helping out.
2011-11-30 DentonWiki, the first LocalWiki pilot community, launches! And the first general-public version of the LocalWiki software is released!
2011-04-06 Use Twitter? Follow DavisWiki on Twitter!
2011-03-31 Local Wiki update opens submissions for first localwiki pilot community.
2011-03-13 Davis Wiki was the subject of a SxSW panel.
2011-02-28 There will be a planned 15 minute downtime tonight sometime between 8pm - 10pm as the server is migrated.
2011-02-25 http://localwiki.org/blog/2011/feb/25/davis-wiki-offers-almost-everything-authors-inform/
2010-06-26 We're in the New York Times today!
2010-06-24 The Davis Wiki was recently featured in articles at Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, The Sacramento Bee, The Modesto Bee, PoynterOnline, Gawker, boingboing, and reddit. Additionally, Local Wiki was featured on the New York Times Media Decoder blog, The Bay Citizen, and other news sites. 2010-6-16 We won a $350k grant to write new software to facilitate local use of wikis! See http://localwiki.org for more information. Also see the LocalWiki announcement.
2010-5-18 Listen to Davis Wiki co-founder Philip Neustrom and KDRT "Davisville" Host Bill Bunchanan chat about the Davis Wiki on KDRT.
2010-04-01 Rumors of the demise of the wiki were due to the day (April 1st). A new Back Page replaced the Front Page and in a stated effort to "save power" and to "save pixels" the site slowly faded to black over the day, with shrinking text.
2009-11-06 The Davis Wiki is declared "the world's best local wiki" in a blog post from Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. The Davis Enterprise followed up on this with a front-page article on 2009-11-10, headlined "Davis Wiki is 'world's best.'"
2009-10-13 An upstream provider suffered a power issue that caused Davis Wiki to be offline early this morning. For system outage information, you can also follow the Wiki Spot twitter feed.
2009-04-09 wikispot.org (including daviswiki) was inaccessible for nearly 10 hours due to multiple fiber cuts in the SF bay area, at least one of which affected our upstream provider. While we seem to be back up now, you may experience intermittent outages as repair crews work to fix the damaged line(s).
2007-11-06 We noticed some issues involving the daylight savings time switchover and the Events Board — things should be fixed now, but let somebody know if you notice issues.
2007-05-17 On Tuesday we were awarded an Thong H. Huynh Award for Excellence in Community Involvement by the Davis Human Relations Commission!!
2007-4-3 Please read the April 2007 Wiki Update for information about the changes on Davis Wiki and to figure out what "Wiki Spot" is!
2007-4-2 So, yeah, yesterday was April Fools! Kindly ignore absolutely everything you saw on the wiki yesterday!
2007-2-1 If you made a donation via the paypal button on our Donate page between Dec. 22nd 2006 and today (Feb. 1st) you probably inadvertently sent money to "[email protected]." This was a mistake on our part and the donate button should now point to our real paypal account. Update: Because the payment has not been processed, you can log into PayPal to your "My Accounts" tab and choose the "Cancel" option to cancel the transfer. The problem has since been fixed, and donations using the button on the Donate page are now working.
2006-12-22 We made and update to the wiki tonight and the main difference you'll notice is the appearance of the "Files" button in the edit area, which replaces the "Images" button. To attach an image to a page, simply use the "Files" area as you would the old "Images" area. This means that you can upload other types of files (for example, PDF files) to the wiki now, though! To include a pretty link to a file in a page, use [[File(filename)]]. If you notice and problems or have any questions, feel free to ask them here.
2006-12-01 Our DNS hosting provider, EveryDNS.net, has been suffering a series of outages today, causing DavisWiki.org (and every other domain relying on EveryDNS) to be unreachable for most of this time. Apparently the cause is an ongoing distributed denial-of-service attack against the EveryDNS servers.
We have temporarily transitioned to two of Cernio's DNS servers as an interim solution, and will re-architect our DNS infrastructure using multiple vendors as a more long-term solution.
2006-10-20 We will be having a scheduled downtime start at 12midnight in the early hours of Sunday, October 22nd as we move the server between data centers. The transition will take us about 3 hours.
2006-09-05 During the evening of Sunday, 3 Sept 2006, our vendor's vendor experienced a non-obvious yet significant failure in an important piece of network equipment. Because this subtle failure happened on a Sunday night during a holiday weekend, it took approximately 3 hours to diagnose and resolve the problem, during which time access to DavisWiki.org and other sites was unreliable. The vendor has apologized for the failure, and we are working with them to develop a plan to better detect and/or prevent a similar failure in the future.
2006-08-03 Thank you to everyone who donated this weekend! We raised over $2000 in only a few short days and put on a really fun event. Your support is much appreciated and sends a clear signal that the Internet can be an amazing and personal tool for the Davis community. Also, just a reminder that you can donate at any time: see the Donate page.
2006-07-14 Due to a misconfiguration, Davis Wiki dropped out of search engines for a few weeks. The problem has been fixed and the wiki should begin appearing in search engines again in a short while.
2006-07-04 We're looking for volunteers for our upcoming Davis Wiki Fundraiser. If you're interested in helping out, drop a note over on the fundraiser page. We need all the help we can get!
2006-06-12 The wiki now pays attention to returns that aren't strictly new paragraphs. A little explanation: Formerly, when you typed "A<return>B" it would display as "A B" without showing up with a break. We found this to be confusing for almost all new users. The [[br]] macro is now only useful for use inside tables and to add extra spaces, so this minor change will hopefully make editing much easier for everybody.
2006-06-04 We are looking for someone to be the Fundraising Coordinator for our upcoming Davis Wiki Fundraiser. If you're interested, please say something here!
2006-05-26 There will be downtime tonight from 10PM until maybe 4AM so that we can perform some maintenance on our server.
2006-05-17 Read the May 2006 Wiki Update! 2006-04-02 Yes, yesterday was April Fool's Day! Sorry if the music or backgrounds caused any distress :) Also, we had about 40 minutes of downtime this afternoon due to problems with a module in our webserver. Everything should be fine now.
2005-06-16 Wanted Pages now has a new 'Most Wanted' section at the top. Also, some older issues with Orphaned Pages and Wanted Pages have been fixed. This will hopefully make site organization easier for us, and also allow us to crack jokes related to the phrase "Most Wanted."
2005-06-10 At 12:35PM today we broke the 1000th active user mark! Our 1000th user made this edit on the page Off-Campus Books!
2005-05-27 Page saving was a bit slow over the past few days. All problems should be fixed now and editing/saving should be snappy!
2005-04-26 I overlayed some floorplans over the Memorial Union region of the map and added a significant amount of detail. A bit of an experiment, but check it out on the Wiki map!
2005-04-25 The southern region of Campus is now a part of the Wiki Map!
2005-03-25 Wired Magazine lists "simplify urls" as one of the 101 Ways to Save the Internet. We thought we'd do our part. Instead of http://daviswiki.org/index.cgi/Front_20Page you'll now see http://daviswiki.org/Front_Page, a major improvement. (All old links will still work) Additionally, we hopefully improved the overall speed and responsiveness of the wiki this morning.
2005-03-20 We've hit the 3000 pages mark! Our 3000th page is Morning Glory Spillway!
2005-03-10 We've moved to our new server! We're also running the new version of our wiki software (with many improvements). The biggest change you'll notice is the Bookmarks feature. The wiki bookmarks allow you to keep an eye on pages without constantly pouring over Recent Changes. To add a page to your bookmarks, simply go into "Info" on a page and click "Add this page to my wiki Bookmarks." Then the pages you've bookmarked become bold when they're changed and you haven't looked at them since!
Another major change is that links are now totally case-insensitive! This means I can link to Front Page like ["Front Page"] or like ["front PAGE"], and both link to the same page. They display as Front Page and front PAGE, respectively. Choosing proper captialization when creating a page is still important as it remains the 'Title.'
Some minor changes: --X text X-- displays as: text and -->text<-- displays as
text
(Centering and strikethrough were possible before, but it was uglier).
Despite the excitement surrounding this move, it was premature as our previous hosting company (Penguinhost.net) cancelled our account without notice. We had nothing but problems with them from the start, which is why we'd planned ahead and purchased a dedicated server for just us. Mike and I were up all night moving, testing, and tweaking things. The site was down, due to our terrible previous hosting company, from about 1AM until 7AM. Everything should be working now, but if you notice anything fishy, say something!
2005-02-03 We have a new feature: Thumbnails. Everyone is now encouraged to upload large images (so others can see them in full detail), but just remember to use [[Thumbnail]] to keep them reasonably small and make them flow with the page's text better.
2004-12-10 We've hit the thousand page mark today! Let the revolution begin!
2004-12-08 We were unfortunately experiencing some problems with our hosting company today. We apologize and we're working on moving to a better place right now. If you have any spare computer parts (a big hard drive, an old computer) that we could use, drop a line in Wiki hosting. Note that there may have been a period of about 3 hours in which edits were lost (8AM-11AM), so check Recent Changes if you made edits during this time. You may need to re-do your changes if they happened then. We're very sorry but the problem was completely out of our control.
2004-12-05 In a hilariously ironic twist, soon after we made a flyer making light of the demise of davis411.com, our hosting company decided to put us on a new server and bring this site down for about 4 hours every night. Our apologies if you were unable to access the site. We are working day and night on moving to more reliable hosting. You can help by donating a few bucks to our selfless cause.
2004-11-21 We have made some cosmetic adjustments to the search results and revamped the Recent Changes interface. We encourage you to write some comments when you edit a page, now that we have plenty of room for them. Questions/comments? Leave a note in To Do.
2004-11-15 Welcome to our 100th user, ChristyMarsden! At the moment the wiki has 102 users, 586 pages, and we have raised $20 in donations. Thanks to everyone involved. I think it's safe to say so far the project is a catastrophic success.
2004-11-05 Have Firefox or Mozilla? Then you should —— 2004-10-26 Welcome to Davis Wiki! We've added map support over in Davis Map and a "View Map" link in all pages with a map location. Those of you who were here before we were public, you might want to re-read the Davis Wiki Guide as there's a lot of new stuff. If you have any comments/suggestions about general site matters, To Do is the place to put them, for now. Welcome!
2004-10-13 We're going to open the site up very soon! It's a matter of days, literally. We still have a few things left to do, but it's going to happen soon! More updates as they come. .
2004-08-31 Being Davis students, we've been busy moving into our new places this past week. Once things stablize we will continue to move toward our goals for public release. MikeIvanov is going to make some really cool mapping stuff that will help tie a lot of our content together in new ways. We're also securing our existing code a little more. Anyway, have a good day!
2004-08-10 WikiNames are dead! Long live ["Links like this"]! From now on, if you see a space, include a space. It's really that simple! Some things might be broken, but of course, fix any broken links or tell us about your problems.
2004-08-09 What do you think of the ["Wiki Name"] business? Would it be better if we only had one way to link to pages — just using ["Page Name"] and got rid of ["Wiki Names"] all together? Or is it nice? Please let us know in To Do.
2004-08-04 The development has slowed down a little in the last week, but that's only because we have other things we need to be doing. Nevertheless, we have added some editor buttons which make formatting a page much easier. Try them out when you edit a page! Also, we have set up a PayPal account for possible future donations.
2004-07-29 The features just keep on coming. In the last couple of days PhilipNeustrom has developed a dynamic XML-based Events Board. As we speak, he is implementing an RSS feed that will allow you to view the most up-to-date events through your favorite blogging site. The next thing to come will be the long-anticipated interactive map—but I promise it will be good.
2004-07-26 We now have a comments feature. This might seem pointless as you can edit all the pages, but this allows for quick comments that don't log in Recent Changes — ideal for personal pages or where you want people to comment without contributing content (like To Do) and do so in a standard way. To include comments just write [[Comments]] or [[Comments(text)]] in your page.
2004-07-20 The wiki is now very pretty. There's still a lot of work to be done — but what do you think? Leave a note in To Do.
2004-07-19 Lots of work has gone into the new theme, codenamed "egghead," and we plan to finalize the navigation and layout aspects tonight, followed by a rehaul of the colors and fonts. Since it is pretty usable, it is now the default theme. Let us know what you think about it.
2004-07-09 We have started working on cleaning up the wiki, rebuilding the interface, and implementing new features that will improve navigability, which may or may not be a real word. Thanks to JenndelaVega and others for contributing content; we're doing the same, only behind the scenes.
2004-07-05 Thanks to the efforts and monetary investments of PhilipNeustrom, we are now on real, solid hosting. The wiki is fast, and it will only get faster after we implement optimizations. The DNS changes are pending, so in a couple of hours you will be able to reach the wiki simply by going to daviswiki.org
2004-07-04 The wiki was down for about 10 hours for unknown reasons. Apologies to everyone who was unable to access it. PhilipNeustrom has set up some permanent hosting, so we will be moving to that probably tomorrow and certainly by Monday, if everything goes well. In the meantime, continue to add content, and as long as we don't go down again before the move, everything will be transferred seamlessly in a day or two. Thank you for flying Davis Wiki.
2004-07-02 Everything is coming along so well! Mike has started work on a java applet to do exactly what we want to do with mapping. We're going to start associating GPS/other data with nodes — but you'll notice when it goes into effect because there'll be some sort of "add map location" button on every page. Besides mapping, we've still got a lot of ideas floating in our head — so check out To Do !
2004-07-02 http://daviswiki.org now redirects to our place here. When we move to real servers we'll make it more than redirect.
2004-06-29 Some users on here. We have a BusinessTemplate now. Try to use this so searches will be easier later on when we've got a lot of businesses. (Templates show up when you create a new page, so just select the appropriate one, if offered).
2004-06-29 Now on Joshua's server.
2004-06-27 Opened laptop for external access by Mike, Paul, and some others! Wiki away!!
2004-06-24 Started up the Wiki on my laptop.
