One of the cool things emerging from the gazillion web 2.0 sites that popped up like zits on an unfortunate teens face are websites where you can publish your stuff without creating accounts or registering in any way. Anonymous so to speak.
Posting a quick snapshot online? Want to share a snippet of code? A collaborative manuscript? A mini-wiki for a short-lived purpose? There’s plenty of sites that offer these kind of functions without having to register. You can sign up if you really really want to in most cases, like if you want to claim, edit or delete things afterwards. But sometimes, that stuff is just overkill and maybe you just want to slap it online in a hurry or without any ties to your persona.
Here’s some good anon-services I found:
- imgur.com: image sharing. Quick & easy. Keeps the pics as long as they are used for a fixed period of time. If not, they are deleted. Allows you to upload an image straight from a URL, which is damn handy if you want to avoid hotlinking pics from other sites.
- bayimg.com, hosted by the lads from The Pirate Bay. Arrr! Free speech and all, upload anything (except pr0n that is).
- pastebay.net, another one from The Piratee Bay lads. It’s like pastebin.com, but I’m sure more anonymous and certainly uncensored. Features are syntax highlighting for code and you can create your own sub-domain if you want to separate your snippets from others.
- pastebin.com: I bet you’ve seen this one before. Paste text/code in an online notepad, allowing comments. Great for easy & quick copy-paste sharing.
- pastehtml.com: the same as the above, except that this one takes HTML code and saves it as a working page on the site. It’s like free and ad-hoc web hosting. Pretty darn cool. Keeps the pages forever (or as long as the hosting is payed for) according to the FAQ. Needs a Facebook account if you want to claim pages. Sort of a big minus.
- wrttn.in: notepad/publishing tool. Create and publish text with or without markup, embed images, videos etc. Very minimal in style, but that’s just what makes it look good. All this without branding or ads. Sounds cool doesn’t it?
- shrib.com is another notepad service. Simple and URL based. Share your notes, back em up, keep them private.
- Last one for the minimalistic notepad shizzle is notepad.cc. Very clean and simple layout. Makes it all about just jotting down those notes. There’s always Google if you’re looking for even more of those type of notepad services.
- piratepad.net : online collaborative Etherpad site. Allows for anonymous online collaborative text editing with a built in chat function. There’s more Etherpad hosts out there since it’s open source software. So if you want can even host your own. Oh yeah, and Arrrrr!!! of course. I almost forgot.
- jottit.com : create a wiki, just like that. Anyone can edit, unless you claim it with a password. Sweet for mini sites and all!
A note on the use of “anonymous” here though. If you truly want to keep your identity hidden you might want to take additional measures than to simply trust the above websites in keeping your identity safe. Using a web browser to connect to any web site will give that site data about your browser, machine and geographical location. To shield this information and protect your online identity you should look into using an anonymizer like Tor.