Wednesday, October 31, 2007

bLADE Wiki - 2.20.0 released

Added support for background archiving of previous versions of pages


If you enable this new feature, when you make a change to a page, the previous version of the page will - instead of being overwritten - be moved to the Recycle Bin. So if you decide you don't like the change that you make, you can go to the Recycle Bin and restore any previous version of the page.

This is just a start, so the interface surrounding this isn't very well developed yet. For example, there isn't any nice ability to compare versions of a page or anything like that.

Pages will be timestamped with the date and time that they are moved to the Recycle Bin.

e.g. a previous version of the page "hello" may be called "hello_20071031203000"

If you restore this version, it will still be called "hello_20071031203000". To restore it fully, you will then need to delete (the newer) "hello" and then rename "hello_20071031203000" to "hello". I'll try and improve on this in future versions, but the basics are there now.

A few points to note:

This is disabled by default - if you want it, switch it on in Preferences

You don't have to enable it in both mobile and desktop versions of the wiki. Personally, I plan to enable it on the desktop, but not on the mobile - as I prefer to reduce the I/O on my phone to maximise performance. So my phone will have access to pages archived by the desktop up to my last sync, but will not create new archives.

You don't have to let it save *every* modified version of a page. You can specify a time period for how often the wiki should archive a page.
For example, if you specify 5 minutes, it will only archive a page at most once every 5 minutes. If you edit a page infrequently - like every few days - then this will effectively archive every modified version. But if you are working on a page for a while and flicking between View and Edit every 30 seconds or so, then it will only archive every 5 minutes worth of work.
If you do want it to archive every modified version, you could set this time interval to 0. Personally, I'm planning on setting it to 1 day - storing at most one archive per page per day.

Archives are not automatically deleted. If you use this feature, at the moment, it's going to be up to you to keep an eye on how big your Recycle Bin gets. The Statistics feature on the desktop might help with that.