The Web is awesome and this week I had the pleasure to play with a new ‘face’ of the web platform. It’s built for Raspberry Pi and you can take it as far as your imagination will let you.

Coder

Coder is a very cool project that aim to be a simple way to make web stuff on Raspberry Pi. Short and sweet. It is also an experiment for Raspberry Pi that give you a free piece of software that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple, personal web server and web-based development environment. Basically, all that you need, for crafting HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.  Plus, it’s an open-source project so you could fork it and learn from the source on http://googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/

You can start using it with 3 easy steps

1. Download the image file and flash a 4Gb SD card
2. Pop it into your Pi and turn it on. You won’t notice too much difference to a standard installation whilst it’s booting, but you’ll end up at the prompt ‘coder login:‘
3. Open a browser on any computer on the same network as the Pi and type ‘http://coder.local‘ into the address bar.

Or just watch this short intro

This is the Raspberry Pi after your connect the power, SD card and network cable

Back

Front

It’s not the best photos I’ve taken… but at least something, no?

I hope to record a short screencast that will show you step by step how to start and code on your new gadget. Btw, if you thinking on some use-cases, please share them. I thought it could be a great device for:

• Education – You can set up few devices and start hacking with kids on cool web apps.
• Self made “Office fridge wall” – Well, all you need is some cool web app (e.g. awwapp.com) and let all your friend in the office go wild.
• Conferences: Important information on where is the closest pub, tweet/G+ wall, weather information etc’. Here is a quick demo page I’ve built in 28sec. Its short code is below.

[gist 6662871]

Have fun hacking!