Securely Organize Your Notes Online With 3tags

You remember a few weeks ago I was talking about Clipperz, and how you could securely store your passwords online? Let’s take that a little further with 3tags.

The concept here is similar, although the focus is different. 3tags is designed as a way to store and organize notes online securely. Bear in mind that it’s new, and has a fair way to go. Nonetheless, it’s both interesting and useful.

If you’re familiar with delicious (and who isn’t?) then it’s easy to think of 3tags as the opposite. We don’t want to share this information. Instead we want to ensure that it cannot be shared.

The basis of the platform is that your browser, and especially the javascript that runs inside it, are capable of high grade encryption and decryption. So you write notes locally, and then they, along with your credentials, are saved and encrypted on your PC, and then stored on the web. Even the developers at 3tags are unable to dig around inside your stored information.

Before we get into the details, just remember. It’s encryption, and it’s the web. Keep your wits about you, and don’t gamble your home, job, or children on this working properly. The risk and the decisions are both yours.

The initial screen in 3tags is somewhat sparse, but it soon fills up once you add some notes.

In order to do that, click in the obvious spot… the Add button.

Fill in the boxes to suit. This is a famous New Zealand biscuit (cookie) recipe. I’m reliably told by Google that the name has to do with the colour of the cookies, and not the folk from Afghanistan. Who knew? By the way, Google can do the metric to imperial conversions if you’d like to try the recipe.

Obviously this recipe is not exactly a secret, but you can see how the interface works. Note that you should separate the tags with semi-colons, despite the lack of instruction around that. The rich text editor works just as you might expect otherwise.

Click Save.

Your note is added to the (empty) list, along with some metadata, and the tags are all listed down the left hand side for easy location later on. Search is something that is missing currently and might be useful if you have stored a lot of notes in 3tags.

Once you have more notes in the system, the preview pane on the lower part of the screen is handy for quickly checking out the content of each note with a single click.

For more serious changes you can click the Edit button, and you can remove individual notes using Delete.

Notice that the note I added also has a link in it. That link becomes clickable and underlined for easy use.

That’s basically it. It’s worth noting that making use of the site requires your computer to process javascript at a reasonable speed, and that language wasn’t really designed for this. 3tags recommends the use of Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, purely due to the speed at which it can process the javascript encryption and decryption routines.

As I said, it’s all pretty new.  I found a few unexpected wrinkles. For instance, it didn’t seem to like me coming back and adding more tags to a note after I had created it. Your mileage may vary.

You may also want to check out T.J’s article about TaggedFrog which is also about online tagging.

Let me know how you get on with both 3tags and the Afghans. Do you use any other websites that store your data with encryption? Are you familiar with an easier/safer way to organize notes online.