paste

📊 Project Summary

pasteview and pasteindex were two companion projects I built out of a growing obsession with long-form content — starting with anime, then manga, and eventually webnovels. I often found myself reading text hosted on Pastebin, but the experience was far from ideal. These tools were my attempt to create a cleaner, more comfortable way to read — built around my own preferences and workflows.

📖 Key Features

pasteview:

Minimalist Pastebin reader built with Vue.js
Supports customization of font size, text color, and background
Automatically remembers user settings (locally stored)
Fetches Pastebin content via CORS, without any backend
Built for readability, especially for long-form text like webnovels

pasteindex:

Companion backend with a RESTful API for managing Pastebin codes
Supports authenticated users to create, read, update, and delete entries
Includes API documentation and token-based auth
Acts as a personalized library of tracked Pastebin links
Designed to integrate directly with pasteview

🛠 Technologies & Learnings

Vue.js: pasteview was one of my earlier experiments with Vue and helped me understand component-based design and reactive state management.
REST API design: pasteindex gave me hands-on experience with building and documenting a full API, including authentication and resource handling.
Frontend-backend integration: Coordinating pasteview and pasteindex as separate services helped me think more modularly, and gave me a better grasp of CORS and client-server architecture.
LocalStorage: pasteview used local storage to persist reader settings without requiring login or a backend.

🔁 Project Evolution

These tools worked well for my use case, but over time I discovered lightnovel-crawler, a more powerful community-driven project that could fetch novels from a variety of sources and export them in multiple formats.

Rather than continuing to build my own tooling in parallel, I decided to stop development on pasteview and pasteindex and began contributing to lightnovel-crawler instead.

While short-lived, these projects were meaningful — they solved a real personal pain point and helped me get more comfortable working across the full stack. They also marked one of the first times I built something for myself and later chose to contribute to a broader open-source project.