Sometimes the coolest updates are the ones behind the scenes that would otherwise go unnoticed. You may have already seen how WikiPack can sync with Dropbox; it’s fast, and transparent. Well now it’s even better!
Room for improvement
To make the sync happen so seemlessly requires quite a bit of back-end infrastructure and engineering that I won’t bore you with, but while it was great, it was vulnerable to falling down when certain individuals decided to import a folder with several hundred Markdown pages in it. The system would become saturated, which would eventually result in it getting slow and unresponsive.
Furthermore, while sync errors were rare, they did occur but without any graceful error handling; a page might just fail to sync for no apparent reason for example.
Building a rock-solid foundation
The overload problem has been resolved now, so you should be able to import a Dropbox folder with hundreds of Markdown files in it without a problem. (It might take a while, but it will work.)
On the rare occasion that the Dropbox API fails to respond, or some other unforseen gremlin interupts a sync operation, it now gracefully handles that too by allowing you to view/edit the page, or try re-syncing it. There is no option to try turning it on and off again though...
Ready to scale
So with this update, I’m quietly comfortable that the system is ready to scale. By that I mean that meeting an increase in demand is simply a matter of allocating more server resources, not that in it’s current state it could withstand the onslaught the would come from hitting the front page of Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot. Of course, I won’t stop you if you’d like to put that to the test :)
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