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Web Notes Alert

By Will Bontrager

I'm so excited :)

Yesterday and today, I developed a method of taking notes while surfing that I think you will really, really like.

I call it the Web Notes system.

As you surf, select text you want to quote and drag it into the Web Notes form. Even the address in the browser's address bar can be dragged into the form.

Web Notes saves your notes and can email them to you, for use in your blog or article or other document.

It can't get much simpler than that.

It won't be available until Tuesday, when it is officially released and download URLs are published. Watch the Possibilities ezine, if you are a subscriber, or this blog if not.

The templates for implementing the system are free, but the software engine that processes the notes is not. The engine is Master Form V4. The latest version (4.5.1.4, updated today) is required.

This is how you use Web Notes:

1. Open your browser. This will be your surfing window.

2. Open a new browser window. Load the Web Notes form into this new window, and resize the window down to the size of the form.

3. Arrange your surfing window and Web Notes form window side by side.

4. Now, as you surf, simply select text from your surfing window and drag it into the Web Notes form. Drag the URL in the browser's address bar, too. It's as simple as that.

No more selecting, copying, clicking, and then pasting!

Now, it's selecting and dragging.

You can manually type your own notes whenever you feel like it, but it's not required.

Your notes are saved in a file on the server and can be emailed to you at the end of the note-taking session.

As my first foray into the world of using Web Notes, I did a search on Google for a certain JavaScript function, document.URL, and made some notes while surfing a few of the web pages in the first results page.

It took about 10 minutes.

---

Page: OBJECT: Document

"The Document object provides access to the elements in an HTML page from within your script. This includes the properties of every form, link and anchor (and, where applicable, any sub-elements), as well as global Document properties such as background and foreground colors."

There is a lot of information, all fun to have available but more than you'll need for any one project.

Page: Document Object

"Document is the parent object of numerous other objects, such as 'images', 'forms"' etc."

This page also has a list of document object properties with descriptions.

Page: Display All URL Variables

"Read all variables being passed by a form method=get or links where variables are written after the document extension."

Here is an example of the JavaScript document.URL code in use. It appears the source code on this page will do a good job (I didn't test it) of grabbing the URL parameters a page was loaded with and printing them out.

Page: Displaying File Modification Date and URL

"This example shows how to use JavaScript to automatically display the file's actual modification date and other document attributes."

This page has another example of document.URL in use.

---

Now, imaging what you could do with Web Notes :)

December 24, 2006

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