Kogbox Blog

This test suite lets developers create a series of tests in a YAML file (or directly on the page). It runs each test and show you any errors in a color-coded display. A test is: a) a live URL anywhere on the web, and b) a string or regular expression to search for on that page.

I’m using this to test Weardrobe.com’s production server - while we do very thorough testing, automated and manually, on the development environment as well as on a staging server, there’s no way to be 100% sure new features will work on the live, production site. I can simply write a series of tests here and on a single page whether the site is working properly. And yes, tests can “log in” to a site to test interior pages; see the example on the test suite page.

These are static tests; they don’t let you test for anything but static text, but they are loosely based on Rails testing… read more here.

Kogbox Test Suite

As you may have noticed, we now have a realtime translation tool provided by Google Gadgets. Some people have been asking for this and we’re very pleased to be able to provide it.

We just released a much cleaner, better, pop-up editor which is resizable. To use it, click the “Open Pop-up Editor »” link in the current Edit window. Once we gather some feedback and fix any outstanding bugs, this new editor will replace the old Edit page. 

One nice feature is that it’s now quite useable on the iPhone, although this should be getting even better soon. 

Using the new Web Clips feature in Apple’s new Leopard operating system, it was pretty easy to make a couple Kogbox widgets to keep an eye on new snippets and comments.

Some users were having trouble running their private snippets. This has been resolved; please email support@kogbox.com if you continue to have trouble.

By request, we’ve added a Snippets page where popular and recent snippets are displayed. (shout out to user Chris!).This comes with a slew of other optimizations and a lot of those little details which make you say “aaaahhhh…” in delight when you seen them. Like more little blue men, now in the comments areas.In other news, we’ve been tweaking the syntax highlighting to be closer to our old standby, TextMate, which should make the hardcore coders happier.And finally, coming up soon, is a full-window editor (pictured above), to make you really feel at home in-browser. It’s still got some snags, so we’ll be testing it out for a week or so before releasing it to y’all, but it should be a welcome relief from tiny textareas.

As pictured above, the search function is growing up a bit. It now searches snippets’ descriptions, names, *and* code… meaning you can find out who else is using preg_match() and why, or how many people use “yaml”.

Also included in this update is a new custom favicon! See above and weep.

I was interested to learn that Kogbox is getting visitors from a pretty wide range of countries. What does that mean? Internationalization… coming soon.

Some users were experiencing an error when saving snippets. This has been resolved; if you have any additional trouble, please contact support@kogbox.com. Sorry for the hiccup!

Last night we added another function, “get_snippet_info” to the Kogbox API. This allows us to create snippets which track information on other snippets… META! See the code_growth_demo (also see the snippet page) snippet (pictured above) for an interesting use of get_snippet_info.