Re: CHAT Tiny URLs (was: NonVerbal Conlang?)

On 6/30/06, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Roger Mills writes:
> > I've been wondering (idly...):
> > What is tiny url's system? I suppose they'll never run out of strings, but
> > if every tiny url is eternal, then it's amusing to think that years in the
> > future, even tiny urls will run to two lines :-))
>
> Hardly.  Given 26 letters in two casings plus 10 digits they can make
> IDs for URLs counting in base 62,
I doubt that tiny URLs are case sensitive, though -- or at least, I'd
consider it a bad decision if they are. Casing is too likely to get
lost when people re-type. Base-32 is, perhaps, more likely (26 letters
plus half-a-dozen digits, not including 1 or 0 which could be mistaken
for letters ell and oh).

> > I've never tried this: if you ask for two tiny urls in a row, do you
> > get anything resembling consecutive strings?? ...
>
> No, you typically get two totally different URLs.
xrl.us uses consecutive strings by default; ltr4o would be followed by ltr4p.

Other tiny URL services may have yet other algorithms.
http://notlong.com/links/ has a partial list.

(makeashorterlink.com was the first such service I came across, and
may well be one of the first public services of this kind. A bit
ironic, though, that their own domain name takes quite a bit of
typing.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Reply