I’ve been wandering around through various IRC channels on freenode.net, and while idling in the #scheme channel I saw a message from the lisppaste bot. I had never seen it before, but it’s a bot that allows for pasting content to a permenant location and sending a notification to the channel the paste is for. Given the way the bot is setup, it looks like the usage pattern is something like this:

  • during a discussion someone hacks together an example solution

  • directly from their editor/IDE they can send the example to the lisppaste bot, the code is then accessible using HTTP

  • the lisppaste bot informs the channel of the location of the pasted code

I think that makes for a pretty cool blending of web based and chat based collaboration.

Another tool that’s new to me is the meme log. This uses channel logs to thread together conversations and present marked-up forms of the log that make it easier to follow conversations. Apparently the lisppaste bot has a hookup that allows it to link pasted code to the conversation which generated it. I haven’t had enough time to fool around with them and see how well they work in practice, but these are some great ideas.