Paste bin websites allow you to share short text snippets, usually code. They are enormously popular on IRC channels where dumping many lines at once into an ongoing chat ("flooding") is considered uncouth. Paste sites take that text out of the channel and onto the web. Paste bins allow you to drop off your chunk of text or code and save it with a unique URL. You can then share that URL with others, so they can view the text you saved.

Pasting sites typically offer a number of enhancement features. Standard options include syntax highlighting for various programming languages, encryption for private pastes, searches for public pastes (these coding solutions while programming), and free subdomains for shared projects.

For years, I've been using several old standbys, namely the pastebin and pastie implementations, which are hosted at numerous websites. My favorite pastebin site is pastebin.ca, which adds numerous features on top of the standard pastebin.com distribution. Recently, though, irc friends have been pointing me towards github. So I finally bit the bullet and checked out github's "Gist" pasting system. Sure enough, Gist takes pasting into the next generation.

Like other paste sites, Gist allows you to drop off text and share URLs. You can use syntax highlighting and set your pastes as private or public. But unlike my regular paste sites, Gist thinks about pasting like github thinks about code repositories. With Gist, pastes are not static. You can edit them, both online and off. You and others can fork your pastes, making each text snippet its own versionable project. I'm told that you can even push back changes that you edited after downloading, although I have not tried this yet myself.

You need to establish an github account to use Gist. This took all of five seconds and involves nothing more than choosing a user name and a password. Once logged in, I could instantly view all my pastes with a single click on my user name.

At this time, Gist does not offer built-in search which is a shame. You can, however, unofficially use Google. Search with your-search-term site:http://gist.github.com/gists. This is, at best, a lame workaround. I hope that github enables searching some time soon; making users log in may be one way to protect against spambots trolling the site. If you're in a diggish "what's new" mood, github provides a recent gists list.

Now that I've discovered gist, will I be going back to pastie and pastebin? Probably not for a while. I'll probably keep using the simplest member of the paste bin family: tinypaste. This zero-option one-paste solution comes in handy when you really don't want to think about all the flexibility that sites like github offer. Here's a quick rundown of some of the many available paste sites: