David's Blog

Update (5/26/2011): I’ve now [open sourced the code](http://github.com/davidwilemski/webpastr) and [wrote a little more about WebPastr](http://oromis.davidwilemski.com/blog/191/webpastr-revisited/)

[Earlier this week](http://twitter.com/#!/davidwilemski/status/26662857425) I though that it would be nice to post a text snippet to PasteBin via Alfred on my Mac. I looked into how a new pastebin post is posted and was dismayed by the fact that I couldn’t set it up just with Alfred’s wonderful custom search feature.

Last night I decided to build a quick [app engine](http://code.google.com/appengine/) application as an intermediate step between me and PasteBin.

I’ve done a little (unpublished) work with Python on app engine before so I quickly chose that as my language. I knew enough to get me going. I had to write a main page (this still must be done) and the script that would handle my requests and forward them on to PasteBin.

I am happy to say that in under an hour I got it working with a very rough set of features; Namely, posting to PasteBin. I have tested that this works if you setup a custom search inside of both Alfred and Google Chrome. I have posted some screenshots of the settings windows for each app here.

One of the things I keep hearing from both people who work at startups and even presenters from Google is to actually release something, to build and iterate.  Even though I don’t even have a webpage designed for the service yet there are no other features yet, I am releasing this. This is not something I would have done before.

In order to create a new post you send a request to this URL: http://webpastr.appspot.com/post?code={yourtexthere}

\[caption id="attachment\_95" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Alfred Preferences"\][](http://oromis.davidwilemski.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Alfred-Preferences.jpg)\[/caption\]

\[caption id="attachment\_96" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Chrome Preferences"\][](http://oromis.davidwilemski.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Google-Chrome.jpg)\[/caption\]

What are my plans for the future of WebPastr?

First, I’d like to support other services. Definitely Gist when GitHub finally allows the API to post new Gists.

I’d also like to support PasteBin’s post expiration feature.

Lastly, I plan on designing a homepage for the app that clearly explains how to use it in various applications. I believe I could easily get Firefox working with this and maybe a Bash script as well.

Feel free to use this now, and be on the lookout for new features soon\!