By Hawkee on Oct 04, 2014You might be wondering where the snippets went and what these new "Pages" are. To answer that, let me give you a little history. When we introduced snippets in 2004 (10 years ago) the concept was simple: Paste a single block of code into a textarea and share it. This was a popular medium at the time. Syntax highlighting wasn't even necessary. We just offered the code back in plain black and white text. Above it was a "Copy to Clipboard" button. In order to stand out from sites like Pastebin we allowed for descriptive text to explain the snippet, but this eventually wasn't enough.
To make these descriptions more rich we started supporting BBCode. After a while users started using [ code ] blocks to add multiple snippets to a page. What began as code snippets started to evolve into full blown tutorials and articles. To better accommodate this we built a new interface for appending multiple blocks of code intertwined with textareas.
Now fast forward to today. BBCode is old news and with the popularity of GitHub and StackOverflow, markdown has become the new norm. Throw in sites like Medium and the user experience has become king. With all of this in mind we decided to evolve into a writing platform for developers. A "Page" no longer requires code snippets, nor does it need to be instructional or even educational in nature. Developers now have a place to write. Be it a tutorial, your experiences as a developer or a guide to getting started with Go, it's a blank canvas. We only ask that you're a developer.
Code snippets do live on. If you have a look at our new page editor you'll find a button to Append a Code Snippet. Whether you're entering raw markdown or using our newfangled hybrid editor you still have plenty of opportunities to share code. I hope that the user experience is so enjoyable that you'll come back again to share more.
So what about our script and app archives? Unfortunately, these will be phased out.. mIRC script reviews are what made Hawkee popular in the late 1990's, but those days have long passed. These archives will slowly fade into history and the new pages will take their place. Our focus is now on two things: Pages and Threads. You're more than welcome to share your projects through either of these channels.
Next I hope to add a gamification system. We'll have unlockable features like additional customization, moderation privileges, and private pages. Hawkee is 18 years old and I plan to see that through to 20, maybe even 30 years. This site is my baby and my playground, so as long as I've got the will to code I'll continue to work on it. Thank you all for your many years of loyalty and I hope we can all continue to grow as developers.
Thank you!