Asymptomatic

"Ah, Owen, you don't work hard enough," I keep hearing you all say. "You're such the slacker! Why don't you do something useful instead of writing all of that blog software?"

Well, between work and Habari, I do like to hang out with the family, and when I'm not doing that (usually after everyone had gone to bed, and long after I should have gone to bed myself) I'm frequently working on stupid little side projects that aren't of any consequence to anyone. My most recent such "mini" pet project is Pastoid.

Pastoid is a weird little thing that I started out of frustration at the lack of fusion between various pastebin services that are available and the tinyurl services that are abundant these days. I use the word "fusion" because I like it better than "mashup", which sounds more like something my kids do with potatoes, and not some whiz-bang web 2.0 technology. Also, it's one of the best lines of my favorite Invader Zim episode. Besides that, I'll tell you what it does.

Basically, it lets you paste either some code or a URL into it, and then it spits out a URL that points to it. So if you give it code, Pastoid gives you a link to that pasted code. If you give it a URL, Pastoid gives you a link that redirects to the URL you pasted. There are some hidden features that might be of interest.

First, if you give it a long URL to make short, Pastoid will give you a short URL with a plus (+) on the end. If you use this URL, you will be redirect directly to the pasted URL. If you remove the plus, then you will go to a page on Pastoid that shows the destination URL and a thumbnail. This saves you the embarrassment of opening up some link for suckers or something potentially NSFW at W.

Another cool thing that I have planned for Pastoid is the ability to paste multiple things on a single Pastoid URL. So you could paste a URL and some code, and some more code, etc. All referenced from a single Pastoid URL. That seems useful if you've got some sample code that has HTML and PHP and Javascript that all goes together. This feature is planned, but you can see the underpinnings of it if you paste both a URL and some code into the two default boxes on the Pastoid home page.

One thing I wanted to do was make Pastoid a bit less cluttered-feeling than the other paste services. Pastie is pretty good in this respect, but I think the PHP world needs to show those Ruby guys that we can still hack, you know? Plus, "pastoid" is seven characters, just like "tinyurl". I thought that was pretty neat.

Did you check out the live syntax-highlighting in the code box? Yeah, that's pretty cool. I combined a couple of very cool open source libraries to get that working. Pretty slick. Still needs refined a bit, but it's pretty slick.

Yes, I'm pronouncing this thing "paste-oid", like "factoid" but with "paste". And "oid". Whatever.

Anyway, I've got a whole mess of new features to add. Actually, I wrote 2+ pages of notes of what I want Pastoid to do, and I think I've only barely scratched the surface of those original notes. I'm going to try very hard to fit all of these features into something that stays usable, and also try to get sleep now and then. Which I'm not doing right now. Gee, how unusual.