Pastebins

I’d forgotten about pastebins until recently, when someone I was following on Twitter linked me over to some text he’d parked on one of them. For those who don’t know, a pastebin is a web location that lets you put up some text on an ad hoc basis so that others can read it. That’s all there is to the thing. Sometimes a pastebin will let you password protect your text; other times not, relying on someone’s having to know the URL to offer a degree of privacy.

Why would you use a pastebin? Because you’ve got some text you want others to see but don’t want, for some reason or another, to use a Google Docs account (which, after all, is a kind of fancy, third generation pastebin). Typically the text will be of temporary interest only and will be aimed at a group larger than is sensible to email. It’s a no-fuss, no-muss, bare-bones, temporary web page, often used by coders to share data as they work on a project.

For example, if I wanted to make a patch of text available on a temporary basis to interested Slaw readers, I might park it on a pastebin and then put the URL on a tweet for those who follow us on Twitter. So you can see, I’ve put this post up at http://pastebin.ca/1939684.

Not for everyone. Not for all seasons. But there are times when this means of publication might make sense for you, so it’s handy to have it in your internet arsenal.

If you agree, you could take a look at a few sites. There’s pastebin.com, of course. And Paste2. And for the patriotic Canucks among us, pastebin.ca — which allows you to make a pastebin of your own.