Adding Notate capabilities to your website

We designed Notate to be straightforward to add to almost any website so that content providers can add annotation capabilities for their readers with minimal intervention. In most cases it simply involves adding a single line to the header or footer of each page.

Benefits for webmasters

• Enable people to make better use of your content - brings more users to the site and makes it more likely they will return
• Favours on-line use over print-and-read by offering useful features that beat the print-and-read equivalent (handwritten notes etc)
• Community development via shared annotation and discussion brings in new users
• The shared public index which your readers build for you adds value to your site and makes it quicker to find what you are looking for
• Ease of installation - simply include an extra line in the header of your pages. No local database is required since everything can be sourced from Textensor servers.

User model and shared content

This beta test focuses on private and small-group use of Notate in order to avoid the "graffiti problem" that generally makes uncontrolled anonymous public annotation of pages useless. All users get their own "private notes" where they can add their own annotations on pages, which only they can see. They can also create groups (e.g. "Lab notes") to which they can invite selected people by email and only group members will share annotations. Some annotations may be of wider interest, so a flag can be set on any group to allow the index terms and/or the notes to be added to a shared public index.

Direct annotation v. snapshotting

Notate-beta has a snapshot function - a browser toolbar button which makes a copy of the current page and starts the annotation notebox. This is similar to the "Save page as..." browser function except that the user's copy is stored on their space on the Notate server where they can annotate it at will.

Users will find it simplest to add annotations to a Notate-enabled site - they just click on the Notate icon and the notepad appears. But the snapshot button lets them add annotations to their private copy of any legacy web page which has not been Notate enabled yet. For webmasters, however, there are several reasons why directly enabling annotation on their site is preferable:

• Annotations are made on the original copy of the site, not on a snapshot.
• Installation and use of bookmarklets is restricted to more technically sophisticated users
• Snapshotted content is fixed in time, including the styling and context, whereas live annotations are shown on latest version of the page.
• Hosting of snapshots is likely to require a subscription for users, whereas hosting of annotations on enabled sites can be made available freely and transparently to the user

Technical details

The simplest way to enable your users to annotate your pages is to add the single line
<script id='_tx' src='http://notate.textensor.com/js/notate.js'></script>
somewhere in each page that you want to be annotatable. Thats all that's needed.

This is a small javascript file that adds the startup icon to the top right of the page. No other javascript is loaded unless the user clicks the icon, so it has a minimal effect on page load time. All javascript and css uses the prefix "tx_" to avoid interference with existing javascript or stylesheets.

If a user clicks the icon, further javascript is loaded that shows any previous annotations and starts up the annotation notepad. Where the user arrives at your site by following a link from the server to a particular note, the application is started immediately and the note is displayed.

Installing your own server

You do not need to run your own server to let your users use Notate on your site. Adding the script element above to will direct unregistered users who click on the icon to the Textensor servers to create an annotation account. Their annotations of your site will be combined with other annotations and snapshots they have made and links from the server will go directly back to your live pages.

If you wish to host the annotations and user accounts yourself rather than on Textensor.com, then you can install a local version of the annotation server which requires only standard features of PHP (version 4 or 5). This has the advantage of keeping readers on the same site when they view their index of notes and allows server pages to be customized to match the host site. Please contact us if you are interested in running a Notate server on your own site.

Supported platforms

Notate-beta works on Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, or Firefox 1.5.1 for Windows, Max OS X, and Linux. We do not currently support Safari on Mac - you can use Firefox on Mac, and we plan to add Safari support later.