FAQ for ContextFAQ for ContextThis website allows you to quickly share rich-text contextual pastes with friends or coworkers of what you're reading on the web. (Watch a demo video on YouTube.)
You can copy-paste selected text or images from websites directly on the home page and create pastes with a single click, or use our bookmarklets or browser extensions mentioned below for better accuracy of copied styles and with the least effort.
You can use this to share context of what you're seeing on your screen, including your personalized ranking on various websites, sensitive interview feedback, code snippets from Terminal.
For web developers, you can even share mockups after you've modified the DOM without resorting to screenshots.
For short-term pastes under a day, we store the contents in memory (using memcached). For longer term pastes, we store them on a cloud storage bucket with automatic expiry after some fixed duration.
We don't log any of the contents. And we don't keep things around when they expire.
It means viewing of your paste is restricted to the people sharing the same IP address as the person that created it. This is great for sharing within an office or corporate network.
While we're in beta, we will not charge anything for this service. We will also not retroactively charge for any pastes created during the beta period.
In the future, we plan to keep short-term pastes free, while charging a nominal cost e.g. $0.10-$0.50 for longer term pastes.
Not everything styled about the page or snippet you copy can be captured. We are working on continuously improving these with bookmarklets and browser extensions.
For Firefox users, Firefox currently doesn't copy CSS styles applied from stylesheets (unlike other Webkit browsers such as Chrome or Safari), so you need to use the browser extension or bookmarklets mentioned below and not the text field.
Also, we disable JavaScript execution on pastes for security reasons (and to be good netizens) and some elements on the original page may be styled or have their styles modified using executed JavaScript.
Some fonts and CSS files also have restrictive Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policies, but we have plans in place to improve this.
You'll need to copy the code with HTML formatting or syntax. Some code editors require plugins to do this. Here are the plugins for Atom, VS Code, and SublimeText.
Our Chrome browser extension doesn't require any special permissions at all. Our Firefox browser extension does currently require the <all_urls> permission to post content, and we haven't found a way around it.
We do not inject any content scripts on any of your pages/tabs. We do not perform anything passively behind the scenes.
If you still want good accuracy of pastes, you may use a bookmarklet. Drag any or multiple of these to your browser: Ctxt 1h Ctxt 1h 🔒 Ctxt 1d Ctxt 1d 🔒 Ctxt 30d $ Ctxt 30d $ 🔒
Note that because of security reasons, the bookmarklet may not work on some sites. Feel free to contact us to let us know if so, or use our browser extension.
For security reasons, all JavaScript from the original website the content is copied from is disabled or deleted. The pastes are meant to only display their contents visually and not interactively.
If this is something that you'd like to have, please let us know.
There are Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policies and Content Security Policy (CSP) restrictions that prevent cross-site scripting attacks used by some of these websites.
Feel free to copy/paste content into the text field on the home page instead for those websites, or use our browser extension which can handle these sites easily.
There are other tools that can do screenshots, and their drawbacks are: it's hard to take one of a scrolling web page without a browser extension, screenshots take up more space and bandwidth, you can't copy-paste text out of an image, you can't inspect the HTML document object model (DOM), and these services are not usually designed to be ephemeral.
However, nothing can beat the accuracy of screenshots and the fact they'll work on any page. We have plans to offer this soon, but let us know if you'd like this feature.
Currently we don't offer any reliability guarantees as we offer this service for free or very low cost. If you'd like guaranteed reliability, please let us know.
Every paste link has a "Report this" link at the bottom right. Click it to report any content and we shall look into it swiftly.
Also, all content eventually expires relatively quickly and the content URLs are long and unguessable so you can also wait for the paste to expire.
There have been many times we've wanted to quickly share the contents of webpages we have access to ("for context"), e.g. interview feedback or personalized rankings we were looking at, and we wanted them to share them effortlessly while having them also expire quickly after sharing.
Pasting into email, Google Docs, downloading the page as HTML and uploading to a web host all had their drawbacks.