Archive for the ‘News’ Category

We’ve been getting a lot of snippet entries that are really just spam. Thanks to users like Frank B., we’ve been able to react to it as quickly as possible. However, a better solution for handling this spam is to give our users the ability to flag these snippets themselves.

We’ve implemented a new “Report this Snippet” link that’s located beneath each code snippet box. Clicking on this link will notify us if you think the snippet is spam. There’s also a built in threshold to take the snippet offline if enough unique users click the link.

We’ll see how this system works and will adjust it accordingly. As always, thank you for using Snipplr!

I wanted to write a quick post to update you all on what’s been going on with Snipplr.

First, thank you for your feedback on the new design, both positive and negative. It’s hard to be all things to all people, but we’re going to give it our best shot. Trey is busy working on an alternate style that is more minimalistic, smaller, and has more room to view code. We’d love to give you more control over your preferred interface. In the meantime, I’ve made some small changes to the interface – like making the code editing block more suitable for code on both the new and edit snippet pages.

Aside from the design, I’ve been working to make some system changes:

• Search. Searching now works more like how you would expect. I’ve also added an advanced search, which allows you to search source code and filter by language.
• Languages. I added some new languages that were requested and also upgraded GeSHI (for syntax highlighting) to the latest version.
• Spam. I replaced the math captcha for new user registration with reCAPTCHA and haven’t seen any spam bots try to create an account since.
• Details. There are lots more minor changes and fixes around the site on both the front and back end. As always, please contact us with any bugs or suggestions you have.

We have lots of more ideas and things in the works, so keep checking back here for the latest news.

We’re proud to announce the launch of the new Snipplr website. The website was redesigned by Shelly Dennison and Scott Holdren, Jason Tan and Trey Piepmeier had a hand in transitioning the website to the new design.

The website has come a long way since Tyler Hall first built it. In the beginning, Snipplr was called Caffeine and it looked like a bare bones Web application from 37 Signals.

Since then, it’s come a long way. The new website has several new features, including the ability to expand the code view. The search has also been completely overhauled and works much better than the last version of the website.

We have some very big features that we’re planning to introduce later this year. Subscribe to our blog and also our Twitter account to keep up with the latest Snipplr news, including beta announcements.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed code snippets to Snipplr over the years. You are what makes Snipplr so great.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Snipplr moved to a new hosting provider, Pair.com. Pair is by far the most reliable and best performing shared hosting environment we have ever worked with. Snipplr will now be faster than ever!

Now that the move is behind us, we’ll be focused on a new development. We expect to launch our new design in the next few weeks, and after that we’ll be focused on some cool new features for Snipplr.

Snipplr has grown a lot faster than I expected when I created the site a year ago. This month alone we’ve had over 40,000 unique visitors sharing their code with one another. And that’s exactly how many of you were left out in the cold earlier today when Snipplr went down.

I received an email from DreamHost Support notifying me that they had disabled the Snipplr database because they had identified some slow queries running on it. Instead of contacting me directly to resolve the issue they simply turned off the database. No warning, no email, no phone call, nothing. Snipplr simply went down.

I’m working as fast as I can to get Snipplr moved to a new web host who won’t go to such extreme measures without giving advance warning. What DreamHost did is reprehensible, lazy, and the sure sign of a shitty web host.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten Snipplr back up and running until I can move it. Will the site go down again if DreamHost decides to disable it? Probably. So please bear with us as we work past this latest hurdle. I hope you never have to deal with a situation like this on your own website.

Tyler

PS – The site may go down, but none of your snippets will be lost.

I’ve been pulling my hair out for the last day trying to figure out why the Snipplr XML-RPC API went down. I noticed that it happened around the time Dreamhost upgraded to PHP 5.2.2. but couldn’t track down the exact cause.

This post from Daniel Jalkut’s blog was the first I had heard of other websites (like every WordPress blog) having similar issues. Turns out, a bug in PHP 5.2.2 makes $HTTP_ RAW_ POST_DATA not set by default. And since the XML-RPC library I rely on uses that variable, kablooey! Goodbye API!

In any case, it’s fixed now.

Today I want to share with everyone a beta version of a new TextMate bundle I’m working on for Snipplr. It’s a major improvement over the old bundle.

Previously, it would pop-up a box for you to type in some keywords. Then it would search Snipplr and show you a list of matching snippets you could insert into your document. That worked pretty well, but you had to be online for it to communicate with Snipplr. You’d lose access to your snippets if you weren’t connected to the net.

This new version syncs your snippets and favorites directly into TextMate’s bundle menu – giving you offline access to all your code stored in Snipplr. If you don’t mind me saying so, this rocks. Here’s a screen shot:

Keep in mind that this bundle is still in development. Everything is working fine for me, but your mileage may vary. You can download the new bundle here. Note: You must be logged in to Snipplr for the download to work. Also, make sure you uninstall the old bundle from TextMate before installing this one.

For the nerds in the audience…

This bundle was a lot of fun to write because it forced me to dig into TextMate’s bundle format. I’ve written some advanced bundles before (at least I consider them to be . . . at work we use a bundle that lets us stage and deploy our clients’ websites on remote servers via TextMate) but nothing like this.

When you download the bundle from Snipplr, PHP generates a custom bundle on the fly based on the snippets in your account. It creates all the .tmSnippet and .tmCommand files as well as the OS X property listings. It’s by no means brain surgery, but it definitely took some tinkering to make it come out right.

The bundle also includes a command to refresh itself. It does this by downloading a new bundle in the background and rsync’ing it with the pristine copy stored in TextMate. I consider this a cheap hack – I’m hoping TextMate 2.0 provides an official API for bundles to self-update. (Ideally, each bundle .plist would contain a URL and version number that TextMate could use to search for updates and, if available, update the bundle à la Firefox extensions. You there, Allan? ) It tells TextMate to update its bundle listing using a quick AppleScript command (osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles').

There’s probably a better way to do all this – I need to search the TextMate mailing list.

Next up, I’m going to try and register the update command with launchd so the bundle can stay in sync automatically – preferably when TextMate isn’t active.

I’d appreciate any feedback from the Snipplr community on this bundle. Bugs and feature requests are always welcome.

Also, if anyone is interested in beta testing the new version of Snipplr we’re working on, let me know.

Yesterday, Mozilla released Firefox 2.0 and with it a slew of new features. One of them is autodiscovery of websites that support Amazon’s OpenSearch format. Amazon describes OpenSearch as “a set of simple formats for the sharing of search results.”

What this means to you is Snipplr (and other websites with searchable content) can be searched directly from Firefox’s search box. There’s no need to first go to Snipplr and then do a search. Now you can search from inside your browser no matter what site you’re currently on. Here’s how it works.

Using Firefox 2.0, go to Snipplr.com – you’ll see the small arrow next to Firefox’s search box light up.

Click on the arrow and choose “Add Snipplr” to add it to your list of search engines.

Now, you can search Snipplr using Firefox just like you do Google. Snipplr will even suggest searches as you type them! Here’s a short screencast showing the whole process in action.

I’ve updated the Snipplr TextMate bundle to fix a small bug. Now it’ll give you a nice error message if you search for snippets and don’t find any. Thanks to Brian for pointing this out.

As some of you know, Snipplr was bought by Sitening last month. It’s a great oppurtunity to help Snipplr continue to grow and even let me get paid for it One of the first improvements coming to the site is a new design. Here’s a quick preview: