My Notepad Info is a free, online service for storing and retrieving personal notes. This site's goal is to provide you with an easily accessible, convenient notepad that you can seemlessly jump in and out of to store and retrieve personal notes. Instead of e-mailing yourself notes or URLs to bookmark yourself from someone else's computer, you can just save them here in your notepad and come back to them later.
My Notepad Info is not an online word processor, and neither is it intended to be. It's not fancy or complicated, and that's on purpose. The goal is to make it as simple and convenient to use as possible. It's meant to store notes, and do nothing more.
This site is accessible via both
MyNotepad.Info and
MyNotepad.org. MyNotepad.org exists as a "normal" domain, named directly for the site. MyNotepad.Info exists as the "catchy" domain name. "MyNotepad.Info"... "My notepad info"... Anyway, both domains work, use either.
My Notepad Info was born out of a personal need for convenience. I (the project's author) would often be in a position where I was browsing from a computer that wasn't mine and I would come across a URL that I wanted to save, but couldn't. Or sometimes I would be out of my house and need to leave myself a note, but was in a position where I had no way of writing myself a reminder that I was guaranteed to be able to find later. These situations would prove somewhat frustrating because I had information I wanted to save, but no convenient way to save it.
Thus I started keeping a notepad in my pocket at all times. It was helpful but it was only convenient for quick notes, it wasn't very handy when I had a lot of information I wanted to jot down. Sometimes I passed the time between college classes by developing an article for my website, or sometimes I'd surf on a college computer for two hours and find 15 interesting (long) URLs I wanted to save for later. There was no way I'd write all that down in a little notepad, so my only option was e-mailing whatever it was I wanted to save to myself or (if I
was on my laptop) saving the info to a text document and hoping I'd remember to retrieve it later.
But that got old really fast. Thus I created, literally,
my notepad on my personal website. For those of you with knowledge of HTML, I just made a <form> with a simple <textarea> and "save" button that submitted the page to itself and used three lines of PHP to save my notes to a file on the server. Simple, dirty, and crude, but it worked. And I lived off of it. I used it daily, during long stints at school or a friend's house. On school computers, friends computers, even my own laptop. Any time I was away from home and found an interesting URL (dozens of times per week), wanted to make a somewhat lengthy note to myself, or wanted to make any note but didn't have my notepad with me, I saved it effortlessly to my Internet notepad on the spot.
In summer '07, I decided to enhance the notepad. I added some sizing options for the notepad, used AJAX to avoid page refreshes to make using the notepad more seamless, etc. Combined with a friend's vague interest in having me duplicate another notepad for him, I figured I'd just make it a public service for anyone to utilize.
I maintain this website by myself, but I'd like to thank some people for helping debugging it. Thanks to the guys at hackerthreads.org for
critiqing the first version of My Notepad Info that I put up by finding bugs and offering feature suggestions.