June 28, 2008

Pastebin - perfect for code collaboration

Have you ever pasted code you are working on to a colleague over IM or even email for some help or an opinion? Then you would benefit from using pastebin (free service) particularly if you experienced problems with code over IM in the past :(

“Pastebin is a tool for collaborative debugging or editing”

What that means is you can paste any code into a nice big textarea on the pastebin homepage, choose your syntax highlighting (ColdFusion is available!), enter your name and hit send.

Then you are redirected to a URL which you can copy and send to anyone else so that they may view your code.

The cool thing is that the other person can see your original code, but can also add their own modifications in a separate box for you to see and collaborate on.

You can “save” your code on pastebin for a day, a month or forever which means you can always come back to it later for further review.

One thing to note is that everyone can automatically see your posts from the pastebin homepage, if that’s not your cup of tea you can create a “private” pastebin. This will allow you to have a sub-domain (as long as it’s unique). Example, I could have barry.pastebin.com/ to store all my entries.

*** Note**: This is NOT password protected, anyone guessing your sub-domain will have full access to your posts. It just means you can view and review posts without the rest of the “noise” of the regular network and have them all stored under a sub-domain container.

More questions can be answered from the help page

Update

It goes without saying that code owners would and should never post sensitive code to a forum such as this as there is no security on the transmission to the server or on access to the site.

There is no mention (that I can see) of copyright on pastebin, treat everything you see and post as public domain.

© Michael Sharman 2017