Solo Technology

Tonight, while aimlessly wandering about, I stumbled over a reference to a pastebin. I must say that my initial response was very much along the lines of, “wtf is a pastebin?” I’ve never heard of ‘em! So, I jogged over to Wikipedia and found much information.

I’m enamored.

This is such an obvious web application (in hindsight!) and cool tool! I do a lot of support via IM. Often times, I’ll put a piece of a web app in “debug mode” (ie spit out LOTS of stuff) and then ask the user or tester to give it a go. Then they get to cut and paste a page log of stuff and … try to IM it to me. That rarely works, so we then resort to email. And email is fine, but I have to wonder if this pastebin stuff makes more sense? For instance, most of the servers I looked at offer syntax hiliting. That’s huge when playing show and tell with XML, for instance!

So far, I’m digging PasteServer, but man there are a lot of options. All free and all offering various bells and whistles. But really, syntax hiliting seems like the “gotta have” so far.

Of course, the thought of hosting my own is already intriguing me.

One Response to “Pastebins”

1. Peter on February 9th, 2006 5:57 am
   

   Oh, I’d love to run something like this on my own server! It is nearly as handy as NanoURL, http://motyka.org/url/g632n

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