Account and sync
Signing in, and what an account does and doesn't get you.
TODO — written, but do not publish yet.
The extension ships a working sign-in flow and a working sync engine, and everything below was checked against their code. What’s missing is a public address:
API_BASEinbackground.jsishttp://localhost:8080, and the manifest allows only that origin, so nobody outside the team can create an account or sync to anything.Hold this page back until the backend is public, or it will generate support mail Pagenail can’t answer. Two things also still need writing when it is: the web app has no documentation of its own to link to, and there is no password reset to describe (see the last section).
Pagenail works without an account. Notes are stored on your computer and need no sign-in. An account exists for one reason: so your notes survive a reinstall and show up on a second machine.
Signing in
Click the Pagenail icon in the toolbar. The popup has Sign in and Register tabs; both take an email address and a password of at least eight characters.
Registering sends a verification email, and the popup then says Verification email sent — check your inbox, then sign in below.
Until the address is verified, the popup carries the reminder Email not verified — check your inbox. That reminder is the only difference: the extension doesn’t hold any feature back while an address is unverified.
Signing out
Signing out clears every note from this computer. This is the one thing to read twice.
The popup shows your email address and a Sign out button. Pressing it:
- Tries to push anything not yet sent up to the server first.
- Tells the server to end the session.
- Deletes Pagenail’s local data on this machine.
Your preferences survive — your colour scheme, your note font size, which edge the dock sits on — because those describe this browser rather than the account. The notes do not. They’re on the server, and signing back in brings them down again, but until you do, this machine is empty.
If the push in step 1 fails — you’re offline, the server is unreachable — anything written since the last sync is lost with the rest. Export a backup before signing out if that matters. See Getting your notes out.
Signing in to the web app
Sign in to the webapp too hands your extension session to the Pagenail web app, opening a tab for it if one isn’t already there. The popup then says Check the webapp tab to finish signing in. You don’t type your password twice.
What syncs
All three kinds of note: thread notes, stickies, and global notes. Notes shared with you are not sent anywhere — they aren’t yours.
It runs on its own, without a button:
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| About ten seconds after you stop editing | Your changes go up |
| Every few seconds, on the page you’re on | That page’s notes come down |
| At least once a minute | Global notes come down |
Two rules decide what happens when the same note changed in two places:
- A note you’ve edited but not yet sent wins. Pagenail won’t overwrite your unsent work with the server’s older copy; your version goes up on the next push instead.
- A delete beats an edit. If the note was deleted on another machine, it goes here too, even if you had just changed it.
Notes you wrote before signing in aren’t left behind: signing in pushes whatever is already on the machine up to the server, so an account adopts the notes you’d been keeping locally.
The same happens if a session lapses — if Pagenail can’t renew it, your notes stay exactly where they are rather than being cleared, and the next sign-in pushes anything new up. Only signing out deliberately empties the machine.
Password reset and email changes
There is currently no password reset, and no way to change the email address on an account. Neither is built — not in the extension, and there’s no screen for either. If you lose the password, there is no recovery path today.