Thursday, May 10, 2012

Faster account sync with the Dropbox delta API

~~~

Firstly, I’d like to clarify the difference between “account sync”, and “page sync”. WikiPack turns Markdown files in a Dropbox folder into your own private wiki, which it keeps in sync with changes made by external applications.

Account sync

When viewing the list of all pages in your wiki, the Sync button will sync your entire wiki folder with Dropbox, checking for updated files, newly added files, and any files that have been renamed or deleted, and it applies those changes to your entire wiki.

It used to be s l o w … by nature of having to iterate through every page in your wiki and check for for updates, but Dropbox released a new API method to address that issue, which WikiPack has now implemented.

For this reason, I pretty much never used to use the account sync, mainly because it took too long, but now when I have a bunch of pages that I’ve updated on my Mac or with Trunk Notes on my iPhone/iPad, I can update my wiki quickly and easily.

Page sync

When you’re viewing a particular page, the Sync button just updates that page. My workflow often involves creating a blank page which I’ll just give a heading and save before opening it in an external editor, which may be TextMate + Marked, or an iOS app like Writing Kit. When I’m done, I’ll hit the Sync button again to pull the changes into my wiki.

First run

The first time you use the new account sync, it may take a while to complete, but after the first pass each subsequent sync will be much faster.

A note on security

As always, the privacy policy stands - the delta API will only give WikiPack the names of files outside your wiki folder, which it will ignore. It does not provide WikiPack with the contents of any files. WikiPack will only read or modify the contents of pages within your wiki.


Questions & comments:

No comments:

Post a Comment