Pinnwand 1.0.0 and its history

pinnwand 1.0.0 was released and shortly thereafter followed by the customary 1.0.1 release to fix that one bug that always gets discovered just after release. You can download these from PyPI.

The major features that have been added to the pinnwand 1.0 release are:

multi-file pastes, pastes can now contain multiple files
shorter URLs, paste IDs are now more readable and less typo prone
pinnwand was fully rewritten for Python 3 in the Tornado framework.

Together with a slew of smaller changes and bugfixes.

history

I've been asked before to clarify on the history of the pastebin and how it came to be. This section of the blog post will go into that.

Back when bpython was started I was one of its contributors (still am) on a different nickname. I thought it would be neat if we would add pastebin support to bpython but to do so I didn't want to be reliant on a 3rd party pastebin.

Back in those days there was another pastebin called LodgeIt, it was ran by the people behind Pocoo and built on the Flask framework. I setup my own instance of this on the bpaste.net domain. That name came from the bpython name.

After a while some features (I don't exactly recall which) needed to be added to bpaste.net and I decided to fork LodgeIt and named it pinnwand. That means "bulletin board" in English and was fitting for a thing that people put stuff on for others to see.

In keeping with the theme my other projects that involve pinnwand are named in similar vein: steck (to stick) a client for sticking stuff on the pinnwand and nagel (a thumbtack) as the library to interface with the pinnwand.

This fork then went on to be hosted at both bpaste.net and on a separate domain for the #python channel on Freenode. Someone else maintained that instance of pinnwand. The pastebin recommended in the channel flip flopped between the channel instance and bpaste.net.

A few years later I rekindled my love for the project and decided to start from scratch. With this a lot of history was lost but here we are at version 1.0.0 and here to stay!