Page links - organising your Markdown pages

The secret sauce of WikiPack, so to speak, is the way it organises your information by linking it together. It does this by starting with a foundation of Markdown pages, and augmenting them with WikiWords that give your pages context, and form relationships between them.

What are WikiWords?

Say you have a page called "My sensible page of serious things". To represent that as a WikiWord, we remove the spaces, and capitalise each word to give:

MySensiblePageOfSeriousThings

So to add that page to your wiki, you’d create a page called "MySensiblePageOfSeriousThings", and it would automatically have your chosen Markdown file extension added to it. (You can choose which extension to use when setting up your account)

Linking pages together

The power of WikiPack is the way it allows you to freely link your pages together using wiki links. Currently, wiki links come in two flavours, standard and custom.

Standard wiki links

To link one page to another, simply wrap the target page’s WikiWord in double square brackets. For example:

[[MySensiblePageOfSeriousThings]]

Standard wiki links are rendered on the page as the WikiWord, in this case as “MySensiblePageOfSeriousThings”, but most times you’ll probably want to customise the link text.

Custom link text

To customise the link text that is shown on the page, use a “pipe” character | as so:

[[MySensiblePageOfSeriousThings|my sensible serious page]]

In this case, the link will appear on the page as “my sensible serious page”, or whatever you enter after the pipe.

Inter-page links

WikiPack builds a database of links between your pages, so that as you navigate your wiki you can use the convenient links at the bottom of each page to jump to other pages that link to it. As your wiki grows and you organise your pages in different ways by renaming them, it automatically updates the inter-page links, but will also automagically update the links within the referring pages.

So the context & relationships you create between your pages is always maintained, making it a powerful personal information organiser.

A note on naming conventions and Windows incompatible characters

If you’ve used an awesome iPhone app called Trunk Notes, or indeed many other wiki-like tools, you may have Markdown files using a naming convention like “Special:Header.markdown”, and may have even adopted it for your own purposes. I started using names like “Todo:Home.markdown”, “Todo:Word.markdown” etc. This helps give files context, and in WikiPack makes them easy to find using the quick search box, but unfortunately it causes problems with Dropbox sync.

It turns out that the Windows file system has several characters that cannot be used in filenames, including the colon. There’s a full list on this Dropbox support page:

• < (less than)
• > (greater than)
• : (colon)
• ” (double quote)
• / (forward slash)
• \ (backslash)
• | (vertical bar or pipe)
• ? (question mark)
• • (asterisk)

The Dropbox API is inconsistent in that it allows apps to upload files with colons in the filename, but will not allow them to be renamed. Currently WikiPack will break if you attempt to rename a file and leave a colon in the filename, but I’m working on it.

Get your pages organised at http://wikipackit.com