Use jsfiddle.net for problem solving

I can’t stress this enough, use jsfiddle.net.
Never heard of it? Ok, here we go: At jsfiddle.net you can easily try out some stuff with HTML, CSS and Javascript. There are four panels, one for each input language and one for the result. They even support SCSS and CoffeeScript. There is syntax highlighting, simple loading of jQuery or other libraries and so on. It is perfect to test something very fast and share it with others. And if you have an account you can save your fiddles for later.

It is very simple, but also very very good. If I have a question I often put together some lines with jsfiddle and share it on twitter to get help. So everybody can edit the fiddle and save a new version to share it again.

It’s perfect for sharing but it’s also very good for private use. When I’m stuck on a problem while coding QUOTE.fm I’m often so caught up in the context of the whole site that I just need to start fresh and separate the problem. jsfiddle is perfect to tackle just a single issue. So I often throw together only the needed code to just work very focused on that exact problem. And usually I can work out a solution which I can use for solving the original problem.

Sure you can do this locally with your code editor, but jsfiddle is much faster and again, you can easily share it if you need to. I also like to save my solution so I can come back whenever I need to look at it again. Here is an example of a problem I had and where jsfiddle helped me to get a fresh look at it.

jsfiddle is just an alpha version and is constantly getting better. I’m sure I haven’t even discovered everything there is now – for example I just discovered keyboard shortcuts for saving, running the code, etc.

So next time you have a question, a problem or want to just try something very quick, use jsfiddle.