Short URLs

Most all content on this site has an associated short URL which is advertised on the page in a rel="shortlink" link. Those short URLs are resolved using a small server called gum.

Short URLs on this site generally follow the design of Whistle, Tantek Çelik’s short URL resolver. URLs take the form of /<type>/<id> where <type> is a single-character identifier for the content type, and <id> is either a name or encoded ID for the resource.

Content Types

Tantek documents his design for content types at http://ttk.me/w/Whistle#design. I use the following types:

• b - blog post, longer form article
• c - code
• p - photo or gallery; previously used for posts, which now use b
• s - slides
• t - short text note; pretty much all text content that would not be considered a blog post
• w - wiki

IDs

Many types, particularly b, p, and t use ID values of the form SSSn, where SSS is the date in sexagesimal epoch days (the number of days since 1970-01-01, encoded in NewBase60) and n is a count of how many posts of that type I’ve made on that day.

For example, given the URL https://wjn.me/b/4_e1:

• b - this is a blog post
• 4_e - the sexagesimal epoch day representing 2015-02-13
• 1 - this is the first post of this type on this date