Working with WikiPack - lists of links

I was just about to go about my daily tasks, in this case processing an email, when I realised it might be of interest to anyone wondering how to integrate WikiPack into their productivity workflow.

As a general rule, no - as a strict rule, I don’t use my email inbox as a todo list, but rather process & then archive or delete them. If they can be acted on immediately, I do so, otherwise I’ll add an item to my todo list. The problem though is the disconnect between the contents of the email, and the todo item related to it.

One way I work around this, is by creating “throw-away” wiki pages for longer todo items. In this case, the email was related to school, so I edited my School page and added a wiki link like:

**[[School-2012-05-31|2012-05-31]]** - received an email with a list of schools to checkout

Hint: Use TextExpander to insert timestamps quickly

I then save my School page, and click the link to create a new page to receive the contents of the email. This way, when I hook it into my other productivity apps, it’s interlinked to my other School related pages. I love using wikis like that.

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Integrating WikiPack with other apps

Having a dedicated wiki page to todo list items is really useful, but the possibilities are endless. Now that I have a wiki page, I can click through the links, find each school’s phone number, and add it to my page. If I need to find one of those numbers later, I can just load up my School page and look it up really quickly.

I’ve previously demonstrated how to hook WikiPack into AddressBook to use it as an ad-hoc CRM, but each page’s URL can be used in pretty much any app that will render it as a clickable link.

Markdown editor features

In the video I demonstrate a couple of handy features of WikiPack’s Markdown editor:

• Turning a block of text into a bulleted list
  • Select a block, hit the list button
• Turning text into links by pasting a URL
  • Select the text, paste in the URL

So now I have my wiki page, and made a video in the process. How productive! Wait, I’d better get back to work… where’s the phone?

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• Email: info@wikipackit.com
• Twitter: @wikipack

Smart auto-linking of pasted URLs

I’m a bit of a keyboard jockey, where there’s a keyboard shortcut I’ll use that in preference to clicking UI elements with a mouse. Maybe it’s a bit old-school, but I find it to be faster and more efficient when writing in Markdown.

WikiPack provides GUI controls for most of it’s Markdown editor features, but also has keyboard shortcuts for things like bold & italic. Now, you can use the keyboard to insert links & images too!

Just paste a URL into the page, and WikiPack will take care of the rest for you. You can either position the cursor where you want the link/image to be inserted, or select some text and paste a URL over it. It knows whether the URL is to a webpage or an image, and creates the appropriate Markdown. This makes linking text to a URL really quick, and inserting images is now even more painless than before, I think it’s great.

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Give it a try, and let me know what you think. Hopefully, it won’t raise the ire of too many people who just want to paste URLs without turning it into a link dang nab it!

• Brett Terpstra’s ultimate Markdown editor wishlist

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• Email: info@wikipackit.com
• Twitter: @wikipack

Getting closer to launch

It’s been an amazing journey working on WikiPack. I’m so grateful to everyone who’s signed up for an account, pushed the site to it’s limits, and helped develop it into a solid product. There’s still some polishing to be done, but the time to shed the “beta” banner and go live is drawing nearer.

What’s left to be done?

Going live will require some significant work around making a great marketing site, and implementing the billing mechanism, so during that time there will have to be a feature freeze. It shouldn’t be for long, but these kinds of things often take longer than expected, so ask yourself “If I could add/change/remove anything, what would it be?”, and have your say in the forums and the feature requests page.

Setting up a company

Why are these things so complicated? It’s not that bad really, the hardest thing is thinking of a company name. From my research, it seems that most of the software apps & services I use have a parent company name, and register their product names as trademarks.

Any ideas or suggestions? Tweet them to @wikipack.

Growth so far

The response so far has been phenomenal!

• In the last week alone, 150 new wikis have been created
  • The growth rate from Jan-March was around 35%
  • The growth rate for April & May has been over 100%
• In total, there are over 11,000 pages on WikiPack
• WikiPack has performed over 13,000 Dropbox sync operations
  • 99.23% of Dropbox sync operations have completed successfully

Humble beginnings, but I’m very pleased! The proof though will be whether this kind of growth can be sustained when it is no longer free…

Business model & pricing

The business model is simple, build an awesome product and ask people for money to use it. The challenge is deciding on the pricing.

I’m a realistic person, and I appreciate that most people who would even consider paying for a service like WikiPack would prefer the price to be as close to zero as possible. At the same time, the cost of the resources required to operate the service even at it’s current user base are beginning to stack up, so I need to find a comfortable pricing point that makes it appealing to you as a user, and viable for me as the operator. Maybe you’d like to help me decide?

My goals are humble: a few thousand people paying a few bucks a month would support future development of the platform. That would be awesome!

As always, send any questions/comments to info@wikipackit.com, or @wikipack.

Thanks,
Mark

Favourites!

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While the whole left brain/right brain thing might be debatable, there are definitely two schools of thought on how best to navigate and interact with information. I’ll term them “searchers”, and “sorters”.

Searchers

Searchers rely on metadata to retrieve the data that they’re looking for. They’re less concerned about where it’s located in their filesystem, or even what the file might be called, than having fast & powerful tools to find it for them by indexing and searching their metadata.

Sorters

Sorters love organising their files into carefully named hierarchical directory structures. They know exactly where to look when trying to find a file.

Visual models

It’s my guess is that searchers & sorters keep different visual models of their data in their minds. Searchers can visualise the data, and quickly produce keywords and search terms to locate it. Sorters can see a visual map of how their files and folders are laid out in their head.

Different modes of interaction

A search box is perfect for searchers, but leaves sorters wanting. Folders may be a sorters best friend, but go unused by searchers.

WikiPack left the sorters wanting, until now. It had a quick search box, but I get that a lot of people just want to see a list of their pages. And while it’s nice to be able to jump to a page by typing it’s name into the search box, it’s even nicer to have quick access to your most frequently used pages with a single click at any time.

Now there are complimentary tools to make navigating your wiki as quick, and simple as possible. In the sidebar where there used to be only a table of contents, there are now two additional panes: pages, and favourites.

Pages pane

The pages pane simply shows a list of every page in your wiki. You can scroll through and find the file you’re looking for, then click on it to go straight to that page. It indicates pages that have been marked as a favourite with a star,

Favourites pane

The favourites pane shows only the pages that have been marked as favourites. The sidebar remembers which pane you have open, so you can use it to really quickly jump between your favourite pages with only a click of the mouse.

First iteration

This is the first iteration of this functionality, and so far I’m really enjoying it. Now that the functionality is available, I’m finding myself using the mouse more, and I realise how some of you might have been sorely missing the ability to do so. It is a little rough around the edges in a few places, but the core functionality is tight and I wanted to get it out before the weekend for people to have a play with it. There will be further tweaks and refinements coming soon.

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Getting in touch:

• Email: info@wikipackit.com
• Twitter: @wikipack

Changing your Dropbox folder

It’s now easy to change the Dropbox folder that WikiPack uses. Just go to your account settings page and click the “Change my Dropbox folder” button. You’ll end up back on the page where you can browse your Dropbox and choose a different folder to import the Markdown pages from.

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Usual privacy disclaimer

In order to be able to use a Dropbox folder of your choice, applications integrating with Dropbox via their API must require full access to the entire contents of your Dropbox. This is a limitation of the API, but our privacy policy stands - while browsing your Dropbox to choose a new folder, WikiPack will read & display the filenames of your data, but will not read the contents of any files outside the wiki folder that you choose.

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Getting in touch:

• Email: info@wikipackit.com
• Twitter: @wikipack

Keyboard shortcut to edit page

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Just a quick update to add a keyboard shortcut for editing a page. When viewing a page in your wiki, hit Control/Command-E to edit it. Use the editor’s keyboard shortcuts for editing the page, then hit Control/Command-S to save it.

To jump to another page, hit the tab key, start typing its WikiWord, then hit enter/return. Rinse & repeat. Should be possible to do a lot more mouse free now.

More usable table of contents

The table of contents in the sidebar, which is generated automatically from the headings within your page, had an issue for really long pages where it would extend beneath the bottom of the page and some links were not accessible. It now scrolls, so you can access the TOC links at the very bottom.

Updated user guide

It’s not much of an update, but you can update the user guide to the latest version by going to your WikiPackUserGuide page and hitting the update button, or using the link in the account settings.

Faster account sync with the Dropbox delta API

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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.

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Questions & comments:

• Email: info@wikipackit.com
• Twitter: @wikipack

Improved signup process in response to "Sign up in seconds"... and then what?

In the beginning there was a boring, boiler-plate signup form with way too many fields. Some brave souls suffered through it, but complained about the complexity.

The next iteration was an attempt to simplify the process by reducing it down to just email & password fields, but there was still some confusion. It was trying to be too clever by generating a login user name automatically, when it could have just used the email address, and it wasn’t clear from the signup page what was happening now, and how much of it would be customisable later.

Sign up in seconds, and then what?

In a 37signals blog post titled “Sign up in seconds” … and then what?, Ryan pondered what would happen if you made it clear what happens next. I liked the idea, and decided to put it into practice and find out!

Clearer progress, customisable fields explained

The WikiPack signup process now clearly shows where you are in the signup process, and what’s going to happen next. It also shows the actual values of fields that are generated automatically from values entered into the form on the fly, and indicates when they can be customised later.

One issue in particular that I’m trying to address with this update is removing any ambiguity about the Dropbox integration by presenting as much information up-front as possible to save people from getting half way through the signup process and then bailing out if they decide that they don’t want/need Dropbox sync. The privacy policy is presented clearly, and the option to use the Lite plan without Dropbox sync is made readily available.

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As always, please direct questions & comments to:

• Email: info@wikipackit.com
• Twiter: @wikipack

Privacy policy

WikiPack has published its privacy policy at http://wikipackit.com/privacy.

In a nutshell, we will always treat your data as your data and always respect your privacy.

Page caching

The page caching is a mechanism where your Markdown pages are stored in WikiPack’s database while various operations can happen simultaneously for improved responsiveness, such as viewing a newly edited page while the changes are being sent to Dropbox in the background. This does involve keeping a copy of your data on WikiPack, which we assure you is private and secure.

When not to use Dropbox sync

There has been a small handful of people who were reluctant to grant WikiPack access to their Dropbox folder because it requires full access in order to share your pages with other apps, but if you don’t want to share your pages with other apps, there is a Lite plan that does not use Dropbox sync.

What to store in WikiPack

Others have commented on using WikiPack for sensitive or personal information. Our recommendation as a general rule of thumb is not to use WikiPack to store any information that you wouldn’t be comfortable storing in other cloud-based services like Google Docs or Evernote. Not because it isn’t secure, or the privacy of your data isn’t ensured, but simply for peace of mind. Use the same sensibility & discretion with your personal data as you would for any web-based service.

Would love to hear your questions & comments!

• Email: info@wikipackit.com
• Twitter: @wikipack

Cancelling your account & deleting all data

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Should you wish to cancel your WikiPack account, you can now do so easily. It will permanently delete all data associated with your account from the WikiPack database, but will not affect any of your Markdown files on Dropbox in any way.

Of course, I would hope that everyone who signs up for WikiPack loves it, but for anyone who for whatever reason decides that it’s not for you, you’re free to leave and take your data with you, because your data is always your data and WikiPack respects that.

WikiPack user guide

Just added a user guide to WikiPack. It should be simple & intuitive enough to use without one, but for those who want a more in-depth understanding of various features it may be interesting.

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New accounts

When setting up Dropbox you’ll be prompted to choose between using a template for your wiki, or choosing a folder to import existing Markdown pages from. If you select the template option, you’ll have the user guide automatically, but for those who choose to import a Dropbox folder you can insert the user guide into your wiki by going to the account settings page (click on your user name in the top right of the page).

Existing accounts

For accounts that were setup prior to this update, you can add the user guide to your wiki by going to the account settings page (click on your user name in the top right of the page).

Questions & comments

If there’s anything that’s not covered in the user guide, or you have any questions or comments, please drop us a line:

• Email: info@WikiPackIt.com
• Twitter: @wikipack
• Forum: WikiPack user forum