With our most-requested feature to date implemented, you can now paste in examples from the Arc Tutorial or snippets you find on the forums.

Also, your sessions become much more portable. It’s now trivial to share your Try Arc session on the forums, or store it in a file for later use. Just highlight your code and copy.

Special thanks to zck for reminding me how sorely this feature was needed.

Hope you enjoy this improvement to Try Arc. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

This has been happening a lot lately, and much more often than I would like. It is easy to fix when noticed (and Pingdom thankfully makes that part easy), but unfortunately it requires the Try Arc console server to be manually restarted. So when the downtime occurs in the middle of the night or while I’m away from my computer, it can continue for more than just a minute.

While the treatment is simple, the disease (and cure) remain mysterious. I’m going to get to the bottom of it but we’re not there yet, so unfortunately these outages are not done with yet. Try Arc has always been a resource intensive and high-maintenance application to have running on one’s server, but it has never been this difficult to keep it stable and running.

I am sorry for any inconveniences these spots of downtime may have caused you. I hate thinking of the disappointed people coming over here to learn Arc or hack around on it, only to find that the console is down. (And perhaps worse, if anyone has lost an important session when downtime occurred in the middle of their usage.)

I appreciate your patience as I work to get to the bottom of this. Please feel free to share any experiences you’ve had with Try Arc being down in the comments below.

If you’re new here and looking to install arc, use the Arc Wiki’s install instructions, which are community-maintained and much better. Then go to the Arc Forum to ask your questions and hang out with all the smart and friendly arc folk.

Welcome to Arc!

Welcome to the Try Arc blog!

Try Arc was just ported to WordPress, and so it is afforded this blog and a couple of other goodies, enumerated below.

New Look

Try Arc has a sleak new look now, created using a WooThemes theme called Canvas.

If you miss the old Try Arc, it will still be available for a limited time from the navigation bar as “Classic”.

Update: The limited time is up and Try Arc Classic has been retired.

Feedback

The feedback forum at UserVoice will continue to be available. But I’ve also introduced a feedback form so you can get in touch with me directly.

Why do your navigation links open in a new tab?

Sorry, I know that’s annoying. The reason is that if you were using the REPL and meandered to one of the navigation items, you would lose your work if it loaded in the same tab.

I would like to find a more elegant solution. Maybe a JavaScript confirm dialog if you have code sitting in the REPL and you click a link.

Update: This was so tedious that I just disabled the new tab feature altogether. Later we’ll find a way to address the problem. For now, be careful what you click on when you’re working at the REPL!

2nd Update: Problem addressed. You will now encounter a confirm dialog if you try to leave the REPL page. Otherwise, browsing should work normally.

Stay tuned for updates

I’ll use this blog to keep you informed about new features and changes to Try Arc as they happen, so stay tuned! Consider subscribing to the RSS feed.