How are people publishing multiple small open-source projects (ie Arduino Sketches of modest size) ?
I'm getting a collection of sketches and other small pieces of code to share. It would be nice to put these at one of the nice open-source code sourcing sites (like code.google.com), except:
They're really not big enough to rate a project for each bit of code.
They're not really related enough to group under a single project (at least, not unless there is some other mechanism for collecting them that lets them be downloaded independently.)
I guess they could go into separate .zip downloads, but that would miss a lot of the nice capabilities (online browsing, etc.)
Just plain snippets are often difficult to understand without examples or some explanation. That's why I like the playground. Admit it can be time consuming to write a readable article. But you will get eternal fame
Just plain snippets are often difficult to understand without examples or some explanation
That's were a good "snippet manager" makes all the difference.
Borland (when they actually produced developer tools) had a very nice snippet manager. Each snippet could have...
Title
Text description
Tags
Hierarchical category
Language
Author
Email address
The tool allowed browsing and searching. I think it even had support for keyboard-shortcuts and a "put the cursor here" marker. You could then have short snippets like this to save typing (the vertical bar was automatically removed and the cursor put in its place)...
if ( | )
{
}
I suggest the first candidate snippet should be Blink without Delay!
That's why I like the playground
I think there is a gap between the included examples and the Playground. It is difficult for the community to contribute to the included examples (is it even possible?) and the playground is just too "heavy" for some things.
The most awesome "snippet" system I ever saw implemented was something done a long time ago called "All BASIC Code" (ABC Snippets); it was run by this one guy who would collect submissions, package them up, then put them on a website for others to download. Tons of BASIC code examples, programs, games, etc - for QBASIC, QuickBASIC, QBPDS, PowerBasic, etc - if it was BASIC related, you could get your snippet in there. Lot's of awesome examples for the BASIC community of the time happened there. The snippet manager itself was coded in BASIC (IIRC, QuickBASIC 4.5), and was included as one of the snippets in every distribution.
I think something like that (but more up-to-date) would be great for Arduino snippets - though the manager would have to be in some portable format (Java?), or would have to be accessible as a web site, of course. The playground is close to this, but not entirely the same...
