Hi,

I released the first public version of "Smalltalk Labs Browser for blogs"
(or just SLBfb since that name is really long.. ^^), a JavaScript widget
that you can put on your blog (or any other kind of website) to offer your
readers a web based Smalltalk code browser for classes you mention or even
describe in an article or tutorial so that people don't need to have a
Smalltalk image at hand to understand what you're talking about. The widget
pops up when someone clicks on a classname and can be moved freely around a
website, but it tries to position itself automatically in the best position
when you don't move it by yourself and keeps doing so even when the web
browser is resized.

The widget downloads the source code of a class from a database over the
net. At the moment the database has all 3093 classes of Pharo 1.1 in it and
more Smalltalks (where code redistribution is allowed) are going to come
soon, including some popular frameworks and libraries like Seaside. The only
requirement to add this to a blog is that you can add custom JavaScript to
your blog's template, you don't need a blog that runs on Smalltalk/Seaside
for this, which means most free blog services work fine (including Tumblr
and Blogger).

I hope this will be of help to the Smalltalk community. It's completely free
and Open Source, licensed under the thoroughly permissive Apache License
Version 2.0 (both the widget and the database/website). I'm running this on
Google App Engine and the free quota (bandwidth, database space, CPU time,
etc.) should be enough to serve the whole Smalltalk community, or at least
that's the idea.

You can try it out directly on the SLBfb website:
http://slbrowserfb.appspot.com or in my blog post about the release:
http://smalltalklabs.tumblr.com/post/1557829586/smalltalk-labs-browser-for-blogs-released

If you scroll to the very bottom of the website, there's a link
"configuration" which will bring you to the interactive installation
documentation to install this on your own blog/website.

Keep in mind that this is the first release (apart from the pre-release on
Pharocasts some time ago), so there could be some nasty bugs that only
happen when there's a full moon and someone tries to sing a ballad on one
leg with his arms tied behind his back. This only works in WebKit and
Mozilla browsers at the moment, but for unsupported browsers or when you
read a blog post that makes use of SLBfb in an RSS reader or on Planet
Smalltalk/Squeak, a website is used to display the classes mentioned
instead, so it still works but not as nicely.

If someone wants to hack on the code, I'll release a screencast about how to
set up a local development environment some time next week, including a
small introduction on using the git version control system since the code is
hosted on Github.

Cheers,
Chris
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