WideWord no longer offers public documents
Due to the recommendations to update to Rails 1.2.4 I’ve just upgraded both WideWord and WideBlog given them a tiny bit of tlc.
WideWord is my free encrypted document writing web app which doesn’t require any kind of registration. Rather it uses fairly advanced crypto and capability based security.
WideBlog uses similar technology only for “secret blogs”. Imagine you need to create a project blog for a cross company project? This is what it has been mostly used for.
The main “feature” I’ve added to WideWord is removing the ability to create public documents. If you already have a public document it will still work, however you won’t be able to create new ones. I have also gotten rid of the list of public documents. While it wasn’t extreme most of the documents in the last year were spam and without offering any user registration or censorship the best (and quickest) solution was to just disable the functionality.
There are plenty of other services where you can create public documents so I don’t think this is going to be a problem, write me though if you disagree.
Most users use it for the privacy and security features anyway and would probably not want anything public anyway.
Anyway there are currently more than 5000 secret documents and 200 secret blogs. Which I’m pretty happy about. They were part of a secret strategy to take over the world, that I have since dropped. Right now they are simply being maintained.
If anyone wants to give me a serious non insulting offer and you are willing to keep maintaining the service, I am willing to sell WideWord, WideBlog and a range of related domain names. Email me at pelle@stakeventures.com.
WideWord and WideBlog successfully moved
I have now successfully moved both the WideWord and WideBlog service to another server. Again apologies for any inconveniences.
Please let me know if you experience any problems.
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WideWord and WideBlog down time notice
I will be moving WideWord and WideBlog to another server and will need to a maximum of 4 hours tomorrow Thursday, Feb. 15th between 9am and 1pm Central European Time.
I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.
WideWord the accidental enterprise web app 1
It’s funny how things turn out. I designed WideWord as a collaborative tool for small business. It was essentially based on my frustration of sending word documents back and forth between people while working on business plans and other collaborative documents.
There are lots of web based word processors out there and WideWord never became as big as I wanted it to. Writely is probably the most famous of my competitors and has now as everyone knows been bought by Google.
However it turns out as I have discovered from the active users that I do have of WideWord that it and it’s sister service WideBlog actually have most of their users within large companies and government projects. I don’t normally pry in what people are using it for, but a couple of users have told me that they use it mainly for multi company projects, where they can’t use their intranets.
Many of them consider it more secure than other offerings and while I don’t think anyone has gone and had WideWord certified by their corporate security departments, they feel they can trust it more than say google hosted projects due to it’s strong encryption. One Belgian government user told me they had problems sending word files back and forth due to anti virus filters and used WideWord out of necessity as it was the solution that was least likely to get him trouble with his IT department.
I never in my wildest dreams figured that enterprise users would end up using WideWord, but that just goes to show that markets somehow have a way of sneaking up on you. Now to figure out a way of monetizing this market.
WideWord, WideBlog and Talk.org back up
You too should also make sure that your rails apps are updated to Rails 1.1.6 due to the recently announced security hole.
Thanks to the Rails team for handling this quickly.
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