Xippets is a black hole into which all precious code contributions got sucked in and disappeared.
I think everyone has misread Mike’s post.
Those are just screenshots to show everyone how the site is coming along. The site is not finished yet.
[quote=146977:@Richard Summers]I think everyone has misread Mike’s post.
Those are just screenshots to show everyone how the site is coming along. The site is not finished yet.[/quote]
Fact is the new Xippets is just a picture, the old site has been silenced without warning (why ?), and that update was on October 6. It will soon be two months what could have been a great community resource, with hundreds of contributions, is no more. That is unfortunate.
Thats what having a life does to you 
I’m still on with it folks, just in drips and drabs, I apologise for the length of time it is taking but as I’ve previously said, it is a non-profit, non-revenue site and I have done it purely as a free resource for all to use, unfortunately, the tasks that put food on my table and a roof over my head must come first.
Good to hear the project is still on. I am grateful for this benevolent effort since last year, and it was already quite an accomplishment you conducted. Maybe keeping the older version would have been easier than embarking on such an ambitious new project as you had us preview on Oct. 6 ?
Then it will leave you plenty of time to resume the new Xippets.
I fear the site being down too long may damage that excellent idea.
Michel, I understand and if this had been a business I would be very worried about the damage being caused by this lengthy downtime. I sure hope people will begin to use the site again when I get it online as it had a healthy following and hit rate (not just bots) indicating it was being used by a lot of people.
I took the old site down when I did because the SSL certificate expired. I did not want to renew this as I knew I wouldn’t be using it for anything secure after Xippets. I purchased the SSL cert for the new site and as this is all out of my pocket I didn’t want to get 2 certificates running concurrently.
I understand the disappointment, I also want to let everyone know that all the Xippets were captured from the old site and will be posted to the new site. Your data has not gone into the Abyss but is stored offline ready for the new site.
There is a lot to do for the new site and more than I had anticipated. I want to go down the right route with the site as its popularity was more than I had anticipated in terms of traffic. I had no policies in place regarding cookies, privacy, copyright etc and all this needs to be in place when I re-launch.
I also have some ideas for the site which rely on the platform being as secure as can be so testing/breaking/hacking is taking a lot more time than the old site.
Basically, if I get it right at this stage there shouldn’t be a need for a huge overhaul again, new features will just get bolted on and switched on.
I will be updating the status on the site so please visit here for updates
I think most people would prefer a simple download link for the code snippets over waiting for an all bells and whistles website. The problem is not that the new website isn’t up, it is that the code snippets have vanished for all intents and purposes. That is not good for your “customers”, and even if the service is free, the good of the customer should be the most important consideration.
An ambitious website like this is a major project. A download link isn’t - you could even use a Dropbox link to a code snippet archive for that (which would cost nothing).
An example is a code snippet that I was looking for which had been posted to Xippets. However I coulnd’t find it anywhere. Luckily someone had it and forwarded a copy to me. I in turn forwarded it to someone else looking for it.
[quote=147165:@Markus Winter]I think most people would prefer a simple download link for the code snippets over waiting for an all bells and whistles website. The problem is not that the new website isn’t up, it is that the code snippets have vanished for all intents and purposes. That is not good for your “customers”, and even if the service is free, the good of the customer should be the most important consideration.
An ambitious website like this is a major project. A download link isn’t - you could even use a Dropbox link to a code snippet archive for that (which would cost nothing).
An example is a code snippet that I was looking for which had been posted to Xippets. However I coulnd’t find it anywhere. Luckily someone had it and forwarded a copy to me. I in turn forwarded it to someone else looking for it.[/quote]
Markus, I understand. However, it is a little bit more complicated than what you are saying. The database table holding the Xippets is unformatted as is, also it has formatting tags in it for code blocks, bold, italics etc which would be mixed in with the unformatted text. The clarity would be poor. All this is done on the fly when the page is being HTML rendered and the tags are parsed and replaced with the relevant HTML formatting tags.
I could spend time extracting and exporting this but then I would get a lot of complaints that people could not easily read the exported file.