Ghostbin

Ghostbin is a paste service, and I’m going to skip explaining precisely what that is—it’s fairly obvious. The real interesting questions are “why did you build it?” and “where did I get all these bees?”

For the first, I’d like to first list my inspirations and driving motives. When I started, I’d recently fallen in love with a small font named Envy Code R. I’d wanted to put together a paste service (under my own control) for some time, and Envy provided the final impetus; It made my code look awesome—more awesome, in fact, than my code truly was.

At nearly the same time, I’d decided that I wanted to learn Go. The confluence of these two endeavours could not have been more piquant.

Other popular, functional and attractive pastebin services certainly do exist, but I found them to be somewhat lacking:

• Pastie was cool, but the ability to delete private pastes eventually evaporated. Later, the ability to even edit private pastes—which was rather useful for affecting a simulacrum of deletion—vanished. Pastie is not private by default.
• Pastee is private by default and provides both encryption and expiration, but it looks like it tumbled from the proverbial ugly tree. It’s functional, though, and that’s great. It seems to use pygments, much like Ghostbin, but it doesn’t appear to have an updated language list.
• Hastebin looks neat. I have no qualms with it. Ghostbin is an attempt at not only solving the above, but also solving some issues in the industry such as, but not limited to, me not knowing Go. It’s open-source and I don’t think it’ll be going anywhere any time soon. It supports encryption, expiration, pastes up to one megabyte, and about six billion languages. Well, some hundreds at the very least. Also, doesn’t that paint job look simply dandy?

And—get your bees away from me. I don’t even know what you were expecting in bringing them here.

Source code is available at https://github.com/DHowett/ghostbin and http://git.howett.net/paste.git