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

Viewing & comparing the Markdown of previous versions of a page

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!

Manually regenerating your wiki links

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.

What went wrong?

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.

Repairing the damage

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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.

Differentiating between filenames & WikiWords

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.

Phantom Dropbox syncing

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.

In the pipeline

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.

Delimiting code within a line in Markdown

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.

Delimiting code snippets

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 `&mdash;`
instead of decimal-encoded entites like `&#8212;`.

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.