The main idea is to use a browser extension to automatically save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.
Time limitations are what is preventing me from doing this.
Thanks for your feedback! Hope you will use Purplerails. :)
There are a couple of heuristics to avoid wastefully uploading pages: the full page is uploaded only if the reader expresses "sufficient interest" in the page. Currently the heuristic is 90 seconds of continuous reading of a page, or scrolling to the bottom. If a page is read for a minimum of 10 continuous seconds then only the text of the page is uploaded.
Static assets like JS files benefit from deduping: they take time to upload the first time, but subsequently processing them is much faster.
Typically, people read multiple pages in a browsing session: I rapidly open many tabs and then read each one for multiple seconds. There's a debug mode in Purple Rails in which a timer counts up when I switch to a tab. I find that typically spend 100+ (usually much more) seconds on a page that I read through to the end. This is usually enough time on a residential broadband connection (I have Sonic DSL) to finish uploading a page. I also use Purple Rails on a tethered 4G connection almost everyday: uploading is slower than DSL but it works.
Basically, by the time you finish reading a tab, the previous tab you read would have finished saving.
Like I said, nothing too fancy.
The basic algo is to generate a HMAC of the plaintext and compare it against a table of previously uploaded blobs' HMACs. HMAC is keyed with a key derived from the user's password. When a blob is uploaded, the ciphertext and HMAC of the plain text are both uploaded.
But maybe browser extensions cannot obtain permission to do that?
I anticipate that PurpleRails will be used on multiple computers and over several years. Which is why pages are sync'd to the cloud.
I've adopted the current architecture because I feel that the energy barrier that needs to be overcome to persuade somebody to install an app is much higher than the one to install an extension.
With PurpleRails, you will rarely be typing your password once you successfully login. It works kinda like Gmail/Facebook etc: you remain logged in for months at a time.
This page explains why password saving doesn't work yet: https://www.purplerails.com/blog/saving-passwords-why-we-hav...
I'll see if I can do something fancier than what I do now to allow saved passwords to work. I suspect that using a Javascript-based AJAX authentication system instead of a plain-old HTML form, I can achieve the privacy goals as well as ease of use.
I hope you will hang in there and use the current version until I figure out a way to fix this. Thanks!
Copy and paste the same thing into "Autoindex exclude rules" and "Autosave exclude rules".
Could you expand on your feedback on pricing? Can't tell if you're saying $5 is too high/too low. If you wish you can also email me (I couldn't find your email on your site).
I've got another piece of feedback. The numbers seem to be off for me in the web app. I t says I have over 300 pages bookmarked, while the interface only displays 100(which seems like the more plausible number).
$5 is kind of a norm these days, and a lot of times, its too high, depending on what the service is. For instance, there's IRCCloud. Obviously, the interface is good, and they provide easy to use mobile apps, but all that doesn't justify $60 per year. Another example is Pocket. I really like their apps, but they also followed the $5 norm. They aren't providing me much value to be worth $5(every month) to me, so I switched over to Pinboard(which, by the way, is one of those few services doing pricing right these days). There are a lot of services that I can justify paying $5 per month for, cloud storage for instance, but a bookmarking service, nope.
If you want to see the kind of backlash Pocket got for pricing their Premium option at $5, just have a look at this thread on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/26qaif/pocket_intro...
You can list all pages you've currently saved by using adding '?n=10000' to the list page URL. Let me know if the 300 number is incorrect.
Thx for the feedback on pricing. Will take it into account.
Logout if extension not installed is related to the same reasons why saved passwords don't work yet.
The timer is supposed to be a debug feature that I thought was off by default! :) It shows the amount of time you've spent in that tab. I'll turn it off by default in the next update. For now, go into the extension options and uncheck "show page view timer" (near the bottom of the options page).
wrt taking quite some time: the first time you save a page from a site, it's likely to take some time, since things like static assets will also be uploaded. Subsequent saves should be much faster due to dedup'ing which works well on static assets. Let me know if this is not the case.
2) privacy-first architecture (e.g., plaintext is never uploaded, plaintext URLs are never uploaded etc)
and it is terribly inefficient to store say, 30,000 examples of the exact same article. or do you have a way to check and not store duplicates? if so, what if a blog post is saved today and has 10 comments and it is saved tomorrow by another person and it has 11 comments.
technically the page is different so it would be saved again
I think you need to explain exactly how it works a bit better or maybe I'm just not getting it
:)
Please see my reply to idlewords. It isn't literally everything; there are some heuristics to detect what was interesting to you.
I understand you might find this excessive. I routinely find that useful. :) See also "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush.
> and it is terribly inefficient to store say, 30,000 examples of the exact same article ...
You're right: no deduping is and can be done across users (HMACs chained up the user's password are used create dedup hashes). Storage is sufficiently cheap that I feel it's a acceptable tradeoff vs. privacy (i.e., server being unable to confirm that two users have saved the same page).