Skip to main content

Pretty Good Hat

Fixing Syncing

For some time now I have used mover.io to:

  • Copy markdown posts from Dropbox to my web server where my static blog engine parses and publishes them
  • Sync the slogger-generated entries and photos from that same web server up to Dropbox, where they are integrated into my Day One journal.
  • Occasional other file transfers

Previous posts about this: using mover & mover and slogger.1


Mover is positioned to provide this service at scale, and while I’m not enterprise power user, the tool was very useful for me. And, hacking with its API was itself a fun project. So I was surprised to learn, when my daily sync jobs appeared to be failing, that the Mover API was no longer supported and had been unsupported for a year!

Well, it was good while it lasted. Fortunately, the guys at Mover were nice about it and pointed me to a new tool, Kloudless. Because Kloudless returns similarly structured JSON in response to API requests, it didn’t take too long to modify my existing code to get up and running with Kloudless. So far, it’s working great: Kloudless seems to be faster than Mover, the API is quite nice, and it’s built for what I’m doing — API-based file transfers, rather than offering the API as a sort of side feature.

The biggest obstacle to getting up and running was needing to figure out how to handle the paging of returned results; unlike Mover, Kloudless returns only up to 1,000 items at a time, and my Day One folder has more entries than this. This is entirely sensible, of course, but it took me some time to lock in on a solution. After that it was a matter of cleaning up a little and updating my Editorial workflow to copy a file over and rebuild, and I’m back in action on both my laptop and mobile devices.

Everything should be shiny once again! Thanks, Kloudless.


  1. Here’s another great use of a webmentions implementation: Low-overhead lists of related posts, simply by linking them from another post and running the webmention hook. ↩︎