Posts tagged: DPASTE

In July I deployed a major update to dpaste.com. Nothing exploded. Good things resulted.

Once in a while I look at a sampling of recent dpaste activity. Partly I do it so I’m not totally out of touch with what my site contains. Partly I do it because it’s just interesting.

And I do it to confirm that the site is actually used by people who want to share code snippets, not just spambots who fire their cannons into every porthole.

I just sampled 10 random items from the last week. Happily, no spam. Here’s what I saw:

Eight years ago, I launched a simple pastebin site written in Django.

In those early Django days I spent a lot of time in the #django IRC channel. I thought we should have a pastebin that knew how to correctly colorize our code, and which was written in our framework to boot. So I wrote one. Eventually its URL ended up in the channel topic, then in the Django source code itself.

Over the years, changes have been minimal. I switched from a Javascript-powered colorizer to Pygments. I added an API. I fixed things that broke. Mostly I just kept it running and usable. (I’ll also note that many excellent new pastebins were created in those years as well.)

When I created dpaste, I tried to make it both a simple browser-based tool and a simple RESTful API. With very little work you could write a script that created a new paste item with a single POST.

Over the life of the site a few people have discovered and played with that “secret” API. I’ve now made it a bit more official. The new API has its own URL (versioned, even!) and is more tolerant of missing data, just like the web form.

You know, I have yet to actually try Twitter, but if this is the kind of thing people say on Twitter then it’s OK with me!