Notes on moving text around.
Short pieces on sharing text and code without an account — what breaks, why, and how we build around it.
Who writes this: the ShareNotes team — the same people who build and run the tool. ShareNotes has been live since December 2025, and every post here comes out of something we shipped, broke, or had to reason through ourselves. Where a competitor is named, we re-check the claim against their own site before publishing and date it.
5,000 notes! Thank you — here's how it all started
ShareNotes just passed 5,000 shared notes. It all started with half a day of pasting links on one screen and refreshing on another. The story so far, and a big thank-you to everyone who uses it.
Will my shared note show up on Google? How we keep note links out of search
Every ShareNotes note address tells search engines not to index it. Until 18 October that signal only arrived after JavaScript ran. What crawlers saw before, why robots.txt is the wrong tool, the noindex header we send now, and what noindex does not protect.
Notes nobody opens for 6 months get deleted. Here's why we turned that on.
ShareNotes notes now last 1 month by default, and notes set to Keep are deleted after 6 months without a visit. Why we chose that, the promise our own pages made while cleanup was switched off, and how to keep a note alive.
Authorising every WebSocket message, not just the connection
ShareNotes' live sync had three holes: a socket message any client could use to push text into any note, view-locked notes leaking over the socket, and unlimited PIN guesses. How we closed them by checking every message, plus what carrier-grade NAT and an HttpOnly cookie changed.
We gave our pastebin an MCP server. One of its tools refuses to read some notes.
ShareNotes now has a remote MCP server so AI assistants can create and read notes. The design choices behind it: stateless Streamable HTTP, a shared daily cap instead of per-IP limits, a 7-day default, no edit tool, and a read tool that won't open one-time notes.
A 201 that ignored every field: why text/json slips past express.json()
Our paste API answered 201 Created to a pastebinit-style request, stored the raw JSON as the note, and dropped its expiry and burn-after-read flags. How express.json() decides what to parse, why the failure was silent, and the fix.
Ubuntu Pastebin is gone and pastebinit is broken. Here's a working setup.
paste.ubuntu.com shut down at the end of June 2026, and on Ubuntu pastebinit's default pastebin now answers HTTP 400. What happened, a one-line curl replacement, and a pastebinit config we tested end to end.
The classroom problem: a live note only the teacher can edit
Students should see your notes appear as you type, but not be able to change them. How ShareNotes classroom mode does that with one link and a PIN, what we deliberately left out, and how to set it up in thirty seconds.
How we ship crawlable pages from a React SPA without SSR
ShareNotes is a single-page React app with no server-side rendering, yet its landing pages and blog are plain HTML that any crawler can read. How we split the site, the service-worker bug that hid a page from returning visitors, and what we measured.
One note, many viewers: how ShareNotes real-time sync works
One writer, many readers, no accounts. How ShareNotes pushes every saved edit to everyone viewing a note over WebSockets, why writes go over HTTP and reads over the socket, what happens on reconnect, and where the design stops.
Password protection is free here. Why do other tools charge for it?
Some text-sharing tools put password protection and burn-after-read behind a paid plan. ShareNotes gives them away. What a ShareNotes PIN actually is, what it costs us to offer, and — just as important — what it does not protect.
FAQ rich results are gone. We kept the FAQPage schema anyway.
Google retired the FAQ dropdowns for every site in May. We added the markup ten days later, for a reason that did not hold up — and kept it for a better one.
Pushbullet still works. Its Chrome extension doesn't.
Not a shutdown — a Manifest V3 casualty and four years of silence. What actually broke, what people wanted from it anyway, and how to move text between devices with nothing installed.
Send text from your phone to your laptop — no app, no email, no login
The three workarounds everyone uses and what each one costs, plus two that leave nothing behind: a link short enough to retype, and a six-character clipboard room.
Share a password-protected note without creating an account
Password protection is a paywall favourite and one of the least complicated things to give away. The two PIN modes, which one you want, and the one thing a PIN will not do.
Memorable URLs vs. random IDs — what happens to your shared links a year later
Why paste links rot, why random IDs make it worse, and what a human-readable sharing link buys you a year down the line.
How ShareNotes clipboard rooms work — and why we didn't build a separate app
A clipboard room is just a note whose slug you type instead of click. Why the room code IS the address, what that bought us, and the two things it cost.
Share text straight from your terminal
Pipe a diff, a log or a stack trace into a shareable URL with one curl command. Piping patterns, a shell function worth stealing, CI usage, and what you should not send this way.
Why link-preview bots silently destroy self-destructing notes
Paste a one-time link into Slack and it is often already burned before the recipient clicks. The mechanism, the fix, and the trap inside the fix.
5 ways developers share code without a GitHub Gist
Gist is the reflex, not always the right call. Five alternatives — no-login pastes, self-destructing notes, live buffers, branches, sandboxes — and when each fits.