In July I deployed a major update to dpaste.com. Nothing exploded. Good things resulted.
The TLDR It looks different of course, but here’s the other stuff that’s new:
Proper user accounts replaced the old cookie-based “accounts” Signup via GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Google, or plain ol’ username/password “Favorites” feature Optional public profile (linked from items you post) Responsive HTML layouts (looks good on your phone now!) 100% HTTPS More robust database setup Application hosting by PythonAnywhere Lengthened the base-32 item IDs from 7 to 9 digits (and dropped the ambiguous 0, 1, O, I) Added a latest-item blurb (with geolocation when available) to the About page, for fun.
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.
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.
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!
