Natalie Downe

It is always the way, ideas are 10 a penny. If you don’t actually get round to implementing it someone else eventually will. Quite often though it’s the case that I don’t mind not having implemented it, just so long as it exists.

A fine example of this is Snipplr. Ever since I first got into web development I intended to build something like this, I am sure I am not alone here, it is something that was desperately needed. Snipplr do a good job and I am very glad something like this exists now.

A very handy little app, Snipplr lets you store code snippets against a particular language for easy future access. Naturally—like all good web apps—you can tag and comment too.

To the best of my knowledge the Ruby on Rails based ‘BigBold’ (now Dzone) by Peter Cooper, was the first big snippet app. Released shortly after was Snipplr and then CAB, the engine behind Django Snippets.

The winning feature as far as I am concerned is Snipplr’s simplicity, BigBold I think tried to do too much in requiring code type syntax to mark up the snippet, lending itself more toward mini tutorials than reusable code. Snipplr’s recent redesign is nice too, very striking and low on imagery it uses nice and bold typography to bring out the code samples and tags.

Snipplr also has a textmate bundle which is awesome. You can configure key combinations to post or insert snippets directly to what you are working on. There is also an API, browser bookmarklets, Gedit plugin and a Wordpress plugin.

There are a few things that are still a bit shaky, such as pagination or private snippets amongst groups (it only lets you do public or totally private snippets). But all in all an attractive solution if you want to share or store bits of code.