Snippets

• s.sethp.cc
• 2021
• HTML5, Deno, AlpineJS
• Repo

In the past few weeks I have found myself often needing to send snippets of content to my friends & family. Sometimes it's a quote, sometimes it's a link, or even a plaintext file. This is not a wild problem, it's a trivial thing to handle because there are so many ways to get the job done. The incident that sparked me to create a new tool was when I was using someone else's computer browsing reddit and wanted to send an article to myself. Again, there are a plethora of ways to send things like this around but. the problem is each of the "usual" solutions has an associated annoyance:

• Send a text - hard to send / access to someone's computer
• Send a discord message - both users have to be logged in
• Use a url shortener like Kutt.it - you still have to memorize or verbalize a URL
• Just Login to one of your accounts - just for a link? that feels like a huge waste of time for something so trivial
• Use SSH - what normal person would even try this?

Half of the solutions rely on at least one party being logged in to some online account or having to memorize a URL, and I wanted this task to be as absolutely simple as possible.

What if instead of making a unique url or file share every time you need to, you just had one easy URL where you could drop whatever needed to be sent?

I loved the idea of this so much, that I spend the next couple hours building and deploying this little thing. It's very basic and was just 2 files, but It makes the process of sending snippets of content around so much smoother.

I even built a proxy service into this project in case I need to host small websites or files indefinitely. I can add files to a specific git repo, and they will be available. For example, I have a HTML Weather widget on here. I have been using this tool increasingly so! I just really love making things like this becasue they save headaches and time!

April 2022 Update

Over time, I have updated this little app to support more and more features, the most interesting of which are

• scriptable command line access
• shifting from multiple HTTP requests, to a websocket connection
• proxying requests as streams to not hog memory on large files

I use this app almost daily, and friends and family have started to use it as well because of how much time it saves and how straightforward it is to use.