I'm continuing my adventures learning javascript in order to alter E2. This is my latest achievement. I've spent some time working on this thingy. The purpose of this gewgaw is to simulate multiple scratchpads by dividing up your current scratchpad into virtual scratchpads. A lot of us have multiple nodes in progress and it's irritating to try to work on one with other works-in-progress in the way. The Multiple Scratchpad Doohickey adds markup to your actual pad and makes multiple virtual pads that contain individual noding projects. It's just like having multiple scratchpads, only with more sparkly buttons.
So who can use it?
You can! Provided your web browser works with it. I've tested it in Firefox 1.5 and Internet Explorer 6.0 and it seems to work okay in both. If you try it in another browser, and it works, let me know. If it doesn't work, let me know that too. All you have to do is stick a line in your notelet.
<script src="http://www.msu.edu/~siefertd/sp.js"></script>
Update: I believe it works in pre-1.5 Firefoxes as well now.
Please keep in mind that this should be considered a work in progress. A beta version, if you will. What I mean is that it seems to work fine, but frankly, I don't want to take responsibility if it, like, loses the contents of your scratchpad or something. It appears to work just fine for me, but I don't want to promise it'll work perfectly for you. So before you install it, please copy your scratchpad and back it up on your own computer (which you really ought to be doing anyway, don't you think? It's easy to hit the update button at the wrong time and fuck things up.) As far as I can tell, it appears to cope fine with malformed HTML (unclosed tags and so forth) — but it may be that it's not completely fool-proof, and I trust any innovative fools out there to take care and safeguard their data.
A word of warning: I discovered that when running Firefox with the Session Saver extension, which restores the tab contents on restarting Firefox, that it seems to screw up. Specifically, when Session Saver recovers a tab containing a page generated from a form submission, it seems to try to resubmit the form without asking (which your browser won't do normally.) But it screws up - it seems to only send the first little bit, which means most of your scratchpad gets axed. This is not a bug with the scratchpad doohickey, so far as I can tell (unless I'm mistaken, it would happen even if you weren't using it.) But it does cause the loss of scratchpad contents if you leave your scratchpad up when you exit. This is bad. Remember not to leave your scratchpad up when you exit if you're using it.
So what do I do?
So to install it, stick it in your notelet and then visit your scratchpad. The current contents of your scratchpad will appear in a new virtual pad entitled (and this is where my creative genius really shows itself) "New Pad". A button will show up above the scratchpad display to access that pad. You can rename the virtual pad by right-clicking on the title button. Click the (other) "New Pad" button on the upper-right to make another virtual pad. To kill a pad, just empty it; it won't be back after you update.
To reorder the pads (useful to move the most important content to the top for those viewing on the Scratchpad Viewer), clicking the ← and → buttons will shift the currently-displayed pad to the left or right. The "View Raw" button displays a read-only textarea with the current raw contents of your scratchpad (reflecting changes made since you last updated) so you can easily back up your scratchpad periodically. I haven't found any limit to the number of writeups it'll hold; there's no hard limit but at a certain point it'll probably overwhelm the browser. That would only happen if you had a stupidly large number.
It also works with Scratchpad Viewer. If someone has their scratchpad marked public and uses the doohickey, you'll be able to see their scratchpad arranged as virtual pads like with your own. If someone without the doohickey views it, they'll see the scratchpad as normal, with the various nodes-in-progress ordered the same way you ordered the virtual pads.
Newfound niftyness in Firefox
Turns out there's an extension (I imagine it works in other Mozillas as well) called Save Text Area (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1046) designed to — brace yourself — save a text area. It makes backups simple: just View Raw and then rightclick to save a copy.
Please give me feedback
If you like it or hate it, let me know. Also, suggest any new features you'd like. And please please let me know if you find any bugs, because I'm only one dude and I can't test everything. Anyway, try it out. I promise you won't be disappointed, unless it crashes your computer or emails compromising photos of you to your boss or something, and as far as I can tell that's not likely. | 
