tom alison dot com
Pastebins
I came across my first pastebin while following the SpamAssassin mailing list. Users of the SpamAssassin mailing list face an interesting problem. They frequently need to share examples of spam with one another in order to help debug SpamAssassin. But the SpamAssassin mailing list is hosted on the same servers that run all of Apache's mailing lists. Hence the SpamAssassin mailing list is filtered by SpamAssassin itself.
The consequences of this are logical, though ironic. If you want to share the contents of a spam message with the SpamAssassin mailing list, it will most likely get blocked by SpamAssassin. Doh!
So what recourse does someone investigating a spam message have? Answer: post the spam message to a web site, and send the link to the posted message content to the mailing list.
This is where a pastebin comes in. A pastebin is a web site that allows you to publish a snippet of code, a server log, a spam message, or any arbitrary piece of text. You can then share the link with people so they can review it.
The utility of a pastebin extends far beyond my SpamAssassin example. They are frequently used by developers on IRC channels. Pasting a 60 line code snippet into a chat window and telling someone "Hey look at line 32 for me" does not work. Lines wrap in weird ways, monospace fonts are not guaranteed, and line numbers are not preserved.
Similarly, if you want help with an HTML or Javascript issue, you'll have a hard time pasting your code snippet directly into a web site. Most sites, for security reasons, will strip some or all of the HTML tags, and will almost certainly not let you paste Javascript that might execute when it's rendered on the web page.
Here's a list of a few of the pastebins out there and what they can do:
pastebin.com
This is one of the older pastebins and was the first one that I was introduced to via the SpamAssassin mailing lists. It allows you to do several cool things:
- Choose a syntax highlighting mode for your paste. You can also use a shortcut to automatically select a syntax highlighting mode. If you know you're going to paste some ruby code, go to ruby.pastebin.com and the ruby syntax highlighting option will be set for you by default.
- Create a pastebin just for your community. For example, if you run a software company called "Flying Squirrel", setup flyingsquirrel.pastebin.com for all your pastes. Note that these subdomains are not password protected so they can be viewed by anyone who guesses the URL.
- Highlight certain lines in your paste by prefixing them with '@@'.
- Choose the retention time for your paste: 1 day, 1 month, or forever.
- Work collaboratively. For example, you can create a follow-up to someone's paste. Your follow-up will be linked to the original, and you can generate a diff.
- Pastebin.com provides it's source code under the GPL
Here's an example of a paste in pastebin. This is a snippet of Python code that generates awful poetry. It's derived from an exercise in Programming in Python 3.
I created a follow-up to this paste where I added a comment line and highlighted it:
Pastebin provides a diff between the two pastes here:
http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?diff=f4feb6a1c
gist.github.com
Github now provides a pastebin. They are called gists. There are a few nice options:
- Multi-language syntax highlighting. You can also specify a filename and the language will be auto-detected based on the naming convention.
- Support for private gists.
- Quick access to the raw version of the code snippet in a browser, so you can copy code without line numbers in it.
- Git integration so you can clone or fork the gist.
- Embed support (the embed times out so I'm not going to demonstrate it here).
Here's a sample gist: http://gist.github.com/120863
snipt.org
snipt.org has a lot of the features of the previously mentioned pastebins, including syntax highlighting, embedding, access to the raw text, and private snipts. It also offers a few unique options:
- The ability to choose a color theme (with great names like "Glitter Bomb" and "Black Pearl")
- Short urls, with one-click options to post to Twitter or save to del.icio.us or Google Bookmarks.
- A rating system for public snipts.
- Customization options for the snipt viewer such as increasing and decreasing the font size as well as changing the theme.
- An option to turn off line-numbering.
Here's my awful poetry python script with the "Glitter Bomb" theme:
SyntaxHighlighter
This is not a pastebin, but offers syntax highlighting and line numbering of code snippets that you include on sites that you host. It's written in Javascript and offers support for multiple syntaxes. As of version 2.0 it also provides theming support via CSS.
There are SyntaxHighlighter plugins for popular content management systems like Wordpress, Drupal and MediaWiki. I came across an example SyntaxHighlighter in a great post on human-readable sorted du output.
There's a lot more pastebins out there. See the Wikipedia entry on pastebins for more detail. If you're thinking of starting your own, pay attention to the "Abuse and spam" section on the Wikipedia page.
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