Sticky notes associated with web page - how to?

Question

I have this idea for a project. Associated with any web page, i want to create notes that will be saved locally in a database, the notes will be reloaded automatically from that database the next time i visit the same page.

Creating the note is easy, but i'm looking for how to link the notes to the web page url and how to keep aware of the active web page. Any idea?

(Note: i have come to this searching on the internet: http://webkit.org/demos/sticky-notes/ - this is part of WebKit Open source projects) - this is about what i'm looking for.

Thank.

Answer 1

Browserdependent probably. You'll have to have a plugin for every browser type.

IE might be doable via the COM interface, but that probably would require starting IE via a way you control. So that probably will have to be a plugin too.

Answer 2

For browser independence, there are quite a few challenges in this one. One way would be to implement a proxy server and watch for text/html content....this will work for most of the general cases, but not every case. Handling frames for instance... which resource is the "parent" and which is the "child"? Which one contains the sticky note? I think you would have to inject some client side javascript to keep track of things, and that might break some websites.

Answer 3

protonotes.com is a web service version of this. Not sure how they do it though.

Answer 4

Actually, Daniel H hit the nail on the head mate: http://www.protonotes.com

It does exactly as you want, in fact it gives you two options to store your data, the first is hosted, the second is your own mySQL db - protonotes pipes the data from the tack-on style notes to your own db, if you prefer. This means that you're not the only person who can see the notes - access is granted by a unique 'group' key.

I've just deployed protonotes as our main online review tool for two reasons, we can save our own data, and it lacks some features which I generally label "dubious" anyway.

It's simplicity is great, the only thing I'm aware of that could cause a prob is that it dumps a bunch of stuff in the global namespace - if that's a potential problem for you.

• d