What has Twitter done to this world? I for one would like to see the title you type appear in the url.
Less characters means its harder to screw up. Question marks and random letters make non-techie people anxious. If its short, it at least helps.
I was thinking of adding an "author" field, and now that you and some other people mention it, I think I will follow through with it.
Honestly, you seem to have put much more thought into URL shortening than I did. I am using just letters for the character set. Shortening the URL sounds like a good idea. And removing the O's and l's is also something that I think I would do. Great suggestions, thanks!
Markdown is actually in the code, but commented out for the "release" =) So it should be coming soon. Thanks again.
See https://gist.github.com/722474 for a proof of concept scraper. If the key length dropped to 4 chars (and you kept l, o, L, and O in the set), there would only be 7,311,616 urls to try to find all the notes.
I'd suggest using New Base 60, which has some smart readability built in: http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/19402946/NewBase60
Interestingly I chose 5 letters as well for my url shortener. e.g. http://twitter.com/akkartik/status/7915316453580803
Save you a click.
Also I'd like to see a post date on the page.
Finally is it open source?
The app is done well enough where nothing is overtly bad or glaring. That being said, I do have a few light thoughts & suggestions.
- I agree a source textbox for citations would be nice, but it's not too pressing considering you can include it at the end. In a similar vein, an author box would be nice too.
- Any reason why the URLs are 5 letters long? Not to undervalue the popularity of the service, but you could easily start out with 3 letter abbreviations, which would give you ~150k URLs.
- For that matter, what is your character set? Are you using just letters, or alphanumeric characters? Again, I'd prefer the former since you aren't going to get a significant boost from the extra choices. You might also want to take out 'O', 'o', and 'l' so its unambiguous when written out.
- Finally, although I'd be weary of allowing crazy markup systems, it might be good to implement a lightweight format such as Markdown. Nothing too fancy, but it's nice to be able to add emphasis without having to SHOUT.
For fun, my comment on tidypub: http://tidypub.org/moAbu