When viewing & comparing previous versions of a page, WikiPack used to only show changes that affected the rendered HTML which meant that you couldn’t easily see changes that didn’t affect the rendered HTML, such as the formatting of WikiWords within page links.
Now, you can both view and visually compare the changes between the raw Markdown of previous versions of your pages:
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Handy!
First of all, I’d like to apologise to any of you who experienced broken wiki links after the last update. I’m not going to hide behind the “open beta” banner, I made a mistake with the WikiWord generation algorithm and rolled out an update that affected people’s data without asking first, for which I apologise. This update fixes the problem, and provides an optional means of applying the fix to your Markdown pages.
My updated algorithm stripped out some characters that it shouldn’t have, like the - character for example. So if you had a page named “Notes-2012-04-30.markdown”, it generated a WikiWord of “Notes20120430”. The updated wiki links may have worked in WikiPack, but if that page was also in your Trunk Notes wiki, which allows the - character, the previous update would have broken inbound links to that page.
The update applied the new WikiWord algorithm to your existing pages automatically in an attempt to maintain the wiki links between them and shouldn’t have caused any kind of disruption, but because of this error made on my part it actually broke those links for some people.
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Your account settings page now has a “Regenerate wiki links” button which will apply the new WikiWord algorithm to your pages and hopefully reverse any damage made to your wiki links with the last update. This is completely optional, and should only be used if you noticed that some of your wiki links, especially for pages with non-word characters in the filename, stopped working after the last update. If you didn’t notice any problems then you probably don’t need to use the regenerate wiki links function.
The page History function should allow you to revise and rollback the changes made to your pages last week if needed. You'd have to navigate to the page in question, hit the History button in the sidebar, and then... well, comparing the changes wouldn't reveal anything because the it wouldn't have affected the rendered HTML, and there's currently no means to view the raw Markdown of previous versions... you could at least view the page as it was prior to the update last week and if the wiki links still work in that version you can revert it back easily with the link at the top of the page.
Again, I assure you that I always take the utmost care to preserve the privacy & integrity of your data at all times, so I regret that people’s data was affected by an error made on my part.
You’d be forgiven for not even noticing the difference with this update because it was quite subtle, but it was necessary to pave the way for some more updates that I have planned.
The dialogues for creating & renaming files used to be a bit confusing. It asked for a WikiWord, but allowed spaces and non word characters. Behind the scenes, it was actually using it to generate the filename automatically. This was unintuitive, so now it asks for the filename and generates the WikiWord automatically while displaying it on the fly.
If you’re not syncing your wiki folder with an app like Trunk Notes that uses a particular naming format, you can go ahead and enter spaces and other characters in your filenames, but if you’re using Trunk Notes you’d best stick to naming your files with a WikiWord otherwise they won’t be imported into Trunk Notes. The generated WikiWord will match your filename.
WikiPack always maintains your wiki links, so as part of this update you may have noticed some of your pages syncing to Dropbox even though you hadn’t edited them. It was just updating your wiki links with the new WikiWords.
Now that WikiWords are being handled in a sensible fashion, I’ll be working on a couple of other WikiWord related updates. Quite a few people have asked for a list of their pages in the sidebar, and I have one or two other things up my sleeve as well. Stay tuned.
I love the simple way that Markdown parses code blocks - just indent with 4 spaces (or 2 tabs). In a previous update, I added a button to WikiPack’s web Markdown editor for automating the process of working with code blocks, but it didn’t act on snippets of code within a regular line of text.
To insert a code snippet within a line of regular Markdown text, you just wrap it in “backticks” like so:
I strongly recommend against using any `<blink>` tags.
I wish SmartyPants used named entities like `—`
instead of decimal-encoded entites like `—`.
This is especially useful for displaying HTML tags and character entities within a Markdown document, as without delimiting them they will actually be parsed and rendered as HTML.
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Checkout WikiPack’s awesome web Markdown editor with optional Dropbox sync at http://WikiPackIt.com.
WikiPack’s convenient Dropbox sync makes it a great online tool for those who love to use a variety of apps for working with their Markdown files, but for those who just want to edit Markdown online with it’s awesome GUI editor, it was a barrier to entry.
Yesterday, WikiPack added a “Lite” plan that provides all the awesome Markdown editing tools with wiki functionality, but without Dropbox sync meaning that you can be up and running in moments:
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While WikiPack is in open beta, accounts are free and will remain free forever. You get to use an awesome online Markdown tool with Dropbox sync (optional), and I get great feedback and real-world usage stats back in return. So please go ahead and spread the word!
Thanks!
Following up from the last update that added smart bulleted & numbered lists, the WikiPack web based Markdown editor now also has smart quote & code blocks:
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In keeping with the philosophy of making technology smart, but transparent, it does some things that you’d expect to happen instinctively, but may not be aware of while you’re using it. Especially the way it handles quote blocks.
The Markdown spec for code blocks ignores line breaks, but allows you to assert line breaks by adding a double space to the end of each line. If you’re typing into a text editor however and you hit enter, of course you expect it to be honoured as a line break, so WikiPack is smart enough to insert the double spaces for you automatically.
It also allows for nested quotes, but the implementation is a little quirky. If you simply attempt to nest a line by adding a “>” symbol, it will treat that symbol as part of the quote and render it as-is. To begin a new nested level, you need a blank quoted line above it, so when you hit the tab key in WikiPack it creates it for you.
Un-indenting is a little counter-intuitive though. Unfortunately, I couldn’t implement the ubiquitous SHIFT+TAB to un-indent the current line, but instead if you hit the Enter/Return key multiple lines it will un-indent the new line until it reaches the margin, at which point a subsequent press will remove the quote symbol and quit out of quote mode.
With this update, WikiPack now has a full-featured web based GUI Markdown editor, with syntax highlighting. It occurred to me that it might be handy to add controls for adjusting the text size, but that requires inserting HTML tags into the Markup, which is extremely naughty. One thing that it doesn’t provide smart tools for yet is tables, but forget I even mentioned it… :)
Check it out at http://WikiPackIt.com
Sometimes the best technology is the kind you’re not even aware of, but you become so used to it that you really notice something is missing when it’s not there.
Take lists for example. We’ve all used lists in a word processor before, and are familiar with how they work. You usually hit a toolbar icon to set the current line as a bulleted/numbered list, but the rest of the functionality occurs transparently, like the indentation and handling of the bullets.
So when you switch from a dedicated Markdown editor like Byword, to using WikiPack’s web editor, you instinctively expect it to behave in the same way, and now it does!
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There seems to be somewhat of a plaintext resurgence of late, but there are some who feel that Markdown may confuse non-technical people. For WikiPack, it’s a key feature, but for some it may be a barrier to entry. My hope is that by making a web Markdown editor that abstracts a lot of the Markdown away from the writer with smart, transparent tools, that barrier may be removed, and WikiPack may yet see mass adoption.
Maybe WikiPack is useful to more than Markdown nerds and information hoarders like myself :)
Check it out at http://WikiPackIt.com