Lite plan gives a web Markdown editor without Dropbox sync

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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Free forever for early adopters

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!

• WikiPack website: http://WikiPackIt.com
• Twitter: @wikipack
• This blog: http://WikiPack.blogspot.com

Thanks!

Code & quote blocks

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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Smart, transparent technology

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.

Full-featured web based GUI Markdown editor

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

Smart bulleted & numbered lists

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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Markdown for the masses?

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

Quickly navigating within your pages with the static sidebar

I was quite chuffed when I added the automatic table of contents to WikiPack’s sidebar, and showed it off proudly to my wife who promptly observed that when jumping to a section of the page the causes it to scroll down far enough, the TOC scrolls up with it and vanishes…

So I started work on some JavaScript to implement the fairly ubiquitous “sticky sidebar” seem around the web these days. It took a while to come up with a solution that I liked, and here it is:

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It’s not just cosmetic, it serves some important practical purposes:

• the search box is always visible for quickly jumping between pages
• the edit button is accessible when viewing the bottom of a long document
• the sidebar controls remain visible when loading a page with an anchor in the URL
• it makes the TOC really fun to use!

Couple of other tweaks

The search box has been refined since the last post, and the WikiWords are no longer split up at the suggestion of @frosty. (It was displaying iOS as “i O S”)

Thank you to everyone who takes the time to send in questions, comments, and feature requests. There has been quite a bit of demand for a few things that I’ll be working on next (in no particular order):

• Having a list of all pages in the sidebar
• Setting a default home page
• Marking pages as favourites

One of my long-term features that I’m planning is a solution to the “emailing links to myself” problem, but that’s another story…

Inserting images from your Dropbox Public folder

So I had just succeeded in hooking Time Machine up to a network drive attached to my Airport Extreme, and wanted to record the steps involved in my wiki by inserting screenshots I’d taken during the process. For a single image, I’ve shown previously how to use file sharing services like Cloud.ly, but ideally I’d like to be able to stick to using Dropbox.

Do Dropbox files have a public download URL?

No. I logged into my Dropbox dashboard and grabbed the download URL for one of my files, then tried logging out and accessing the same file, but Dropbox returns a 403 (forbidden) error. This is as we’d expect for our private files stored in our personal folders - we don’t want the whole world to be able to access them.

Getting the download URL of files in your Public folder

What follows is my first attempt at dropping a bunch of pics into my Public folder and inserting them in a WikiPack page.

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This technique is great, because you can just drag stuff into your public folder and insert it straight into your wiki. Keep in mind though, that you probably shouldn’t put anything personal or sensitive in there.

Posterous' posterity & data portability

The internet is ablaze with the news of the blogging site Posterous being acquired by Twiter, and what that means for their current users. So they decided to post an FAQ to address common concerns, to which it was commented upon on by @Documentally:

Startups need to factor in data portability from the start.

I couldn’t agree more!

Your data should be your data

WikiPack was designed from the ground up on the principal that your data should always be your data, and never locked into a proprietary data format or system. Some people might express valid concern at trusting a startup company with their important data for this very reason; the company could vanish, and take your data with it. OK, so they might provide archaic tools for exporting your data, but it will likely be of little use to you outside the system it was created with.

So if I’m hit by a bus, or WikiPack vanishes into the startup graveyard, you can rest assured that you’ll still have all of your Markdown pages safe and sound, right there in your Dropbox folder for Posterity. (see what I did there? :)

Default Markdown file extension statistics

Just read an excellent post by Hilton Lipschitz about Markdown file extensions, where he makes the case for using .markdown, and I couldn’t agree more! WikiPack proudly uses a default Markdown file extension of .markdown, but gives you the freedom of choosing a different extension if you like.

I takes no more effort on our part to use longer, descriptive file extensions, and there are benefits such as being able to associate .markdown files with a different editor to other more generic text formats.

To me, it’s a no brainer, but I’ve seen similar issues manifest themselves in programming, where some developers lean towards shortened, abbreviated, often cryptic variable & method names. Why? Code editors these days have this great new thing called “automatic code completion”, so cutting down on typing is a non-issue as it’s mainly abstracted away from you. Similarly, once you create a file, you never need to type it’s file extension again, if ever.

WikiPack stats

Since introducing the ability to choose a default Markdown file extension to WikiPack, users have gone with the following:

Extension	%
.markdown	52.6
.md	31.6
.txt	15.8

Which Markdown file extension do you use?

Update 2012-05-23

The latest statistics from WikiPack users as of May 2012 shows a definite shift towards .markdown being the de facto standard: