Eli Grey

Noteboard 2.0

I have almost completely re-wrote Noteboard from the scratch and made Noteboard 2.0 because I felt that Noteboard 1.0.1 was not that extensible. There are a TON of changes in Noteboard 2.0, most notibly, multiple-document support. Just the same as the original Noteboard, it’s Firefox 3+ (and maby 2+) only. The reason there are only keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) to control Noteboard is so there are no other elements other than a single text box. The stats bar has been disabled by default and can be toggled on by pushing Alt + Ctrl + I. All of the keyboard shortcuts are on the first document, ‘shortcuts’. I don’t reccomend deleting this document until you get used to using Noteboard.

With multiple document support, you can now create as many documents as you like. To create a document, push either Alt + Shift + N or Alt + Shift + C and type in the name of the document. To open a document you can push either Ctrl + Alt + O or Alt + Shift + O. To delete a document, you push Alt + Shift + D. To rename the current document you’re viewing, push Alt + Shift + R. All documents (and document names) have full Unicode support so you may name them whatever you want to and put whatever you want in them.

Another cool feature introduced in Noteboard 2.0 is document autoload URLs. For example, if you made a document called “code snippets”, the document autoload URLs could be http://noteboard.eligrey.com/#doc=code snippets or http://noteboard.eligrey.com/?doc=code snippets. Autoload URLs always load a certain document, instead of loading the document you last hast open in Noteboard. There are two ways to generate autoload URLs for your current document, each one generating either a “#” autoloader or a query string autoloader. To get document autoload URL using  “#”, push Alt + Shift + U. To get a document autoload URL using a query, push Ctrl + Alt + U.

Noteboard’s license is Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, so you may host Noteboard on your own website if you wish. You can download Noteboard for your site via a pre-prepared Noteboard zip file (directly browse in Firefox) that you just have to extract to any directory in your website and nothing else. I specifically made Noteboard to work on any domain and URI (ex. noteboard.example.com or www.example.com/cool/stuff/noteboard/). In case you use Noteboard hosted on noteboard.eligrey.com and one day feel like using a different host, I implemented import and export functionality to Noteboard 2.0 so you don’t have to manually recreate all of you documents. To export your Noteboard data, push Ctrl + Shift + 2 and copy the code given to you. To import Noteboard data, push Ctrl + Shift + 1 and paste the code you recieved from an export into the prompt. You can also use exports as backups.

If this is your first time reading about Noteboard, here are features in Noteboard 2.0 that are also in Noteboard 1.0.1.

  • The tab key actually inserts a tab character into the text where you are typing.
  • Ctrl+S forces the document to save (it should autosave when closed or when a different document is openened). I recommend you do Ctrl+Alt+S to not trigger the “Save As” dialog box.
  • Alt+Ctrl+D deletes all the data stored by Noteboard on the domain it is currently on. Think of it as clearing your cookies if Noteboard actually set cookies. This is mostly needed as an alternative to using Firefox 3’s buggy offline storage management that doesn’t work most of the time.
  • When you Ctrl+V paste, the text is autosaved.
  • Will work on any browser that supports localStorage or globalStorage and will temporary store the data for browsers that only support sessionStorage

Leave a Reply