Whistle personal URL shortener

Whistle is an algorithmically reversible personal URL shortener.

There is an instance of Whistle running at http://ttk.me.

building blocks

Whistle makes use of the following building blocks:

• CassisProject
• NewBase60
• NewCalendar

clients

Whistle is used by:

• Falcon

design

Design notes:

• single-letter content-type prefix
• a - audio recording, speech, talk, session, sound 
• b - blog post, article (structured, with headings), essay
• c - code, sample code, library, open source, code example
• d - diff, edit, change
• e - event - hCalendar
• f - favorited - primarily just a URL, often to someone else's content. for more, see 'r' below 
• g - geolocation, location, checkin, venue checkin, dodgeball, foursquare
• h - hyperlink - e(x)ternal reference, link, etc. use of short URL to link to things that I expect to die or move, untrustworthy permalinks. 
• i - identifier - on another system using subdirectory as system id space
• i/i/ - ISBN (compressed via NewBase60)
• i/a/ - ASIN (compressed via NewBase60)
• j - reserved
• k - reserved
• l . (skipping due to resemblance to 1, per print-safety design principle, related: ShortURLPrintExample)
• m - (message like email, permalink to external list archive, or private blog archive, or a sender-hosted message)
• n - reserved
• o - physical objects (e.g. stuff from Amazon, or URLs attached to actual specific physical objects) 
• p - photo (re-using Flickr's design choice of flic.kr/p/ for photo short URLs)
• q - reserved
• r - review, recommendation, comment regarding/response/rebuttal - hReview/xfolk
• s - slides, session presentation, S5 
• t - text, (plain) text, tweet, thought, note, unstructured, untitled
• u - (update, could be used for status updates of various types)
• v - video recording 
• w - work, work in progress, wiki, project, draft, task list, to-do, do, gtd
• x - XMDP Profile 
• y - reserved
• z - reserved 
• t - text shortening design: /tSSSn
• SSS - NewBase60 epoch days
• n - nth post for the day

implementation

Whistle has an implementation of the following:

• single-letter content-types (on ttk.me for tantek.com)
• i - identifier - on another system using subdirectory as system id space
• i/i/ - ISBN (compressed via NewBase60)
• i/a/ - ASIN (compressed via NewBase60)
• t - text, (plain) text, tweet, thought, note, unstructured, untitled
• w - work, work in progress, wiki, project, draft, task list, to-do, do, gtd
• single-letter content-types (on ufs.cc for microformats.org)
• w - wiki page
• x - XMDP Profile 

additional documentation

Interview, background and some documentation:

• http://www.monkinetic.com/2010/05/tantek-celik-diso-20-brass-tacks.html where Steve Ivy asks me why having a personal URL shortener is essential for DiSo and why it should be algorithmic.

FAQ

Why not use days since you were born instead

Q: Why not use days since you were born instead of days since epoch start (1970-01-01) ?

A: In short: 1. easier debugging, 2. birthday privacy. First, from a practical perspective, reusing epoch start makes it easier to debug: 0 datestamp means 0 epoch time, everyone's personal permalinks share the same NewBase60 datestamps etc.  And second, using your birthday as your 0-day for permalink datestamps would have the side-effect of publishing your precise year/month/day of your birthday which not everyone may want to do - in fact, typically people still keep their full birthday private rather than publishing it openly on the web. Long term if this encoding scheme is still used in say 200+ years, it may make sense to pick a new day zero for folks born after a certain point in time (e.g. perhaps 2200-001 for everyone born on that day or later.).

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