Troubleshooting

My note didn’t come back

Notes attach to a page address. If the address changed, the note is still saved — it’s attached to the old one.

Pagenail ignores the query string, the #fragment, and a trailing slash, so tracking parameters and anchor links won’t split your notes. Two things do:

• www versus the bare domain. These are different pages. If a site serves both, try the other one.
• A different path. /docs/intro and /docs/intro/v2 are different pages, however similar they look.

The full rule is in How pages are matched.

If the address is right and the note still isn’t there, open the dashboard and search for a word from the note. That tells you whether the note is missing or just attached elsewhere.

The dock isn’t on this page

Pagenail runs on https:// pages only. It will not appear on:

• http:// pages
• Chrome’s own pages — chrome://settings, the new tab page, the extensions page
• The Chrome Web Store
• Local files opened with file://
• PDFs, including PDFs served over https
• Other extensions’ pages

There’s no workaround for these; Chrome doesn’t allow extensions to run there.

Also check that you’re not in fullscreen — Pagenail hides everything while the browser is fullscreen, and returns when you leave it.

Everything vanished but the dock is still there

You’ve hit Clear all — the eye icon. Nothing is deleted. Click the eye again, or just reload the page; clear-all resets on navigation.

The note panel closes when I switch tabs

That’s expected. The panel closes when you come back to a tab. Click the article icon in the dock to reopen it; your notes are untouched.

I can’t anchor a note to text

Selecting text only offers Add note on pages stable enough for an anchor to survive. Pagenail decides this from a built-in list of reference sites plus a three-second check of how much the page changes on its own. Most news sites, apps, and feeds won’t qualify.

Ordinary stickies work everywhere Pagenail runs. See Anchoring notes.

My anchored note lost its place

The passage it was attached to is no longer on the page — the article was edited, or the site was restructured. The note is intact and shows a dimmed anchor icon reading Anchor lost. Click it to re-anchor to whatever is now underneath.

My note disappeared while I was editing it

Clearing all the text from a sticky or global note and clicking away deletes it. This is by design and there’s no undo — see Writing notes.

If you have a recent backup, importing it will bring the note back, at the cost of everything written since. See Settings.

I lost notes after reinstalling the extension

Notes live in the extension’s local storage, which Chrome deletes when the extension is removed. There’s currently no server-side copy to restore from.

Export a backup before removing or reloading the extension — Getting your notes out.

Still stuck

Email hello@pagenail.com — include the page address if you can, it makes almost every problem faster to find.