Some notes are meant for people who will never have an account.

The directions to the cottage for the weekend guests. The house rules for the place you rent out. A recipe your sister keeps asking for.

A share link works, but a share link is a private thing, passed hand to hand. Sometimes you just want an address you can put anywhere.

That's what publishing is for, and Scratchpad does it at two sizes: a single note, or a whole folder.

One Note, One Address

In a note's menu, Share… opens a dialog with three tabs. The third, Publish, gives the note a public address.

Anyone can open it. No sign-in, and no link to be handed over. Search engines are invited in.

The address is made from the note's title plus a few random characters, so it reads like something rather than nothing. It's fixed once the page exists: rename the note and the address stays where it was, so a link you've already sent keeps working.

The page is the note itself, not a copy taken when you pressed the button.

Fix a typo, add the new wifi password, and the next person to load the page sees it.

A Folder Becomes a Site

Sometimes one page isn't enough.

A guide to the neighbourhood for guests, with a note for the beaches, one for the restaurants, and one for what to do when the power goes out. Or the notes from a course you teach, one per week.

Right-click the folder in the sidebar (or use its ⋯ on a phone) and choose Publish as a site….

The folder gets one address, and each of its notes gets a page below it. Every note's page lists the folder's notes down the side, and a link from one note to another becomes a real link on the site. Notes in its sub-folders are included.

If a note at the top of the folder is called Home or Index, or has the same name as the folder, it becomes the front page. Otherwise the front page is a set of cards, one per note, with its title and first lines.

A site stays live the same way a single page does, and so does what's on it.

File a new note in the folder tomorrow and it's on the site tomorrow.

Move one out, and it's gone on the next load. The dialog tells you how many notes you're about to put on the web before you press the button.

Note or Folder?

What a Reader Sees

The note as it reads, with its pictures. Attachments become download links, and a PDF downloads as the original file, without anything you've drawn on it.

Under the note sit the date you last changed it, a link for reporting the page, and a line saying it was written in Scratchpad.

What they can't do matters more:

• They can't edit it. The page is for reading.
• They can't see your other notes. A link to one of your notes that isn't published stays as plain words.
• They can't get into your account. Nothing on the page leads there.

On the hosted service, published pages live on their own domain, scratchpad.to. That's on purpose, so a page anyone can publish can't borrow anything from the app.

What Never Goes Out

Locked notes. They're left off a site, even when they sit in its folder, and a locked note can't be published on its own.

Archived and trashed notes are left off a site as well.

Taking It Down

The same tab that published it takes it down, for a note or a folder. The address stops working straight away.

Publish again later and you get a new address. The old link stays dead rather than following you.

One thing is out of anyone's hands, though. A search engine that has already indexed the page may go on showing it in results for a while. The dialog says so plainly before you press the button:

Unpublishing takes the page down but cannot un-index it. Assume anything you publish is archived by someone within hours.

I'd rather it said that than let you find out.

There's more in publishing a note as a page.

Most of what lives in Scratchpad is private, and stays that way.

This is for the few notes that are better off read by someone else.