Stuff and Nonsense

Malarkey is Andy Clarke, a UK based designer, author and speaker who has a passion for design, CSS and web accessibility.

Andy has been working on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer and author and he founded Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. Andy regularly writes about creating beautiful, accessible web sites and he speaks at events worldwide. Andy is the author of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, published by New Riders in 2006.

Code Snippets two-point-oh!

The one where Malarkey admires Code Snippets; not another two-point-oh! photo/blog/rss combo platter.

I'm not a user of many web 2.0 applications, although the few that I have bonded with, including Basecamp, Blinksale, Flickr and Ma.gnolia, I use pretty extensively. Much of 'two-point-oh!' leaves me cold, but one solution has sparked my interest, and this time it's by a Brit, Peter Cooper.

Mashable

Pete Cashmore's Mashable blog has recently muscled its way into my feeds.

Mashable is a blog covering Web 2.0 startups, peer production, user-generated content, revenue sharing, social software and the web as a platform.

During a leisurely browse through Mashable's weblist coverage of two-point-oh! I spotted (among the multitudes of photo/video/audio sharing apps, RSS tools and social bookmakersbookmarking) a little gem lettuce of an idea in the form of Brit developer Peter Cooper's Code Snippets.

Code Snippets

The idea behind Code Snippets is simple.

A tagging system for content, developed in Ruby on Rails. This main installation acts as a Web repository of programming code snippets. It gets approximately 6,000 page-views per day.

Code Snippets

Snippets' interface design and functionality does have room for improvement and I do have certain peeves, comments and suggestions:

• Not being a snake charmer, I'm not that interested in pythons, so I would love the ability to customise the interface to show only the content areas that I am interested in.
• I would like to see DOM driven expanding/collapsing widgets that would help to reduce scrolling on long pages and options for content ordering (author/comments/date etc.).
• Unless I missed something, only a predefined set of tags can be added to a snippet and there is no search.
• There seems to be little in the way of exporting facilities beyond an RSS feed of your own snippets.

Building on Snippets

I hope that Snippets' development team will continue to iterate its interface and functionality and a discrete Snippets (source code available on request) in the site's footer hints at the possibility of other developers building on Snippets' base.

What interested me most about Snippets was the possibility of building a library of best-practice code relating to web standards and particularly to accessibility. This could potentially be created organically or as part of an initiative by contributors to Accessify and its forum.

But for now, I'm enjoying the fact that a Brit has created a terrific tool that isn't yet another two-point-oh! photo/blog/rss combo platter and has done so seemingly without gazillions of VC dollars.

Replies

1. #1 On May 7, 2006 07:17 AM Sherwin Techico said:

   Krugle might also be a good comparison to Snippets. Its still in closed-Beta, but it looks promising. Here's a video/intro of Krugle at demo.com. HTH your interest Andy.

2. #2 On May 7, 2006 11:41 AM Matthew Pennell said:

   I'm working on something very similar, with a web-standards bent.

3. #3 On May 7, 2006 04:39 PM Scrambled said:

   a Coding library based on webstandards would be a great idea; and something I thought about when I bought http://codelibrary.co.uk/ I'd be willing to donate the url to a good cause if someone (WASP) or members of would be willing to give it a start :) (something I mentioned to you at your presentation in Newcastle a little while ago)

4. #4 On May 7, 2006 05:02 PM Robert O'Rourke said:

   It certainly looks useful but you're right about the length of the page, my attention span is limited when it comes to anything but staying up late doing the de-buggery.

   How difficult would it be to have an option on each account that allows you to customise what you see on the front page?

   Something like that would be really cool for all kinds of websites, search engine result pages etc...

5. #5 On May 7, 2006 07:09 PM Peter Cooper said:

   Thanks for the support!

   One thing, you can tag entries with whatever tags you like :) It just auto populates tags for you if you're in a tagged area, but you can change those if you like. There's also a mass export of all your items, but it's not public. It was more of a test to create an eventual API for the system (for example, I'd like to post to it via an API with my blogging software).

   I've been working on a spinoff of Snippets which has the post sorting option, but this has not been backported yet though.. :)

6. #6 On May 12, 2006 11:09 AM Daniel Lynch said:

   Perfect.