How the pencil works
Every note here can be read with a pencil. Select four or more words in any note, and a small bar opens over them: keep, note, write back, copy link. This page says what happens to what you do: where it goes, who sees it, and how long it stays.
You select a few words in a note
In your browser, at once
- The passages you keep, and your notes on them
- One mark on a passage, without your name
Your notes are seen by you alone; the count, by everyone
After a rebuild, with a say
- A note you send me, if you allow it and I agree
- A reply you already made public elsewhere
Seen by everyone, with a name
The note, the next time it's read
What stays with you
keep copies the passage into your commonplace book. note does the same and adds your own words. Next time you open that note, your words are there beside the passage in your own pencil, warmer than mine and marked "you:". They sit in the margin when there's room, or on one line above the passage when there isn't. No one else sees them.
The book also keeps your trail: the notes you open, newest first, the last two hundred. The home page shows its latest under Your commonplace, with the note you were last reading. All of it lives in this browser and is never sent anywhere. That has two consequences. Your phone and your laptop each have their own book, and clearing this site's data clears it. You can export it as Markdown to keep elsewhere, or forget it all from the commonplace page.
What is counted, without your name
The first time you keep a passage, your browser sends one mark for it. There's no separate like button: keeping something is exactly what a mark means, that it stayed with someone.
A mark counts once a day. To know that this browser already marked a passage today, without knowing who you are, the site turns your connection and the day into a scrambled code that can't be turned back into either, and throws it away the next day. Only the counts are kept. A passage kept by three readers or more ends with a pencilled "kept by" and its number, and the passages kept most in the last month appear on the home page under Where readers linger.
What reaches my desk
write back sends me a note on that passage: your words, the passage, and the name and email you choose to give. It reaches my inbox, not the page. Nothing a stranger writes appears here on its own.
If you tick "I may set this beside the passage, with your name" and I agree, your note goes beside the passage the next time the site is rebuilt, with your name and never your email. From then on it's part of my margin, so it's in my pencil, not yours. If you'd like it taken down later, write to me and I'll remove it.
The same goes for a prompt, if you'd like me to think through something I haven't written about yet.
What comes from elsewhere
If you reply on Bluesky or Mastodon to a post that links a note, or link one from your own site, your public reply can appear at the end of that note under Elsewhere, after the next rebuild. It shows as plain words with your name and a link back to the original; no pictures are loaded from other sites. Delete the reply there and it goes from here too.
Keeping it quiet
If the margins get busy, the reading panel's Marginalia: quiet hides every pencilled thing beside the text: my glosses, your notes, the counts. The text itself never moves for any of this.