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> Any reason why the URLs are 5 letters long?

What has Twitter done to this world? I for one would like to see the title you type appear in the url.

Actually, it's more of an issue with writing down the URL and passing it on.

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.

Thanks for the feedback. Much-much appreciated.

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.

I'd recommend against shortening the key length, given that keeping the keys hard to guess is how you're keeping them private.

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.

> 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.

I'd suggest using New Base 60, which has some smart readability built in: http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/19402946/NewBase60

At least linkify urls. It's trivial; use http://daringfireball.net/2009/11/liberal_regex_for_matching...

Interestingly I chose 5 letters as well for my url shortener. e.g. http://twitter.com/akkartik/status/7915316453580803

Link to updated article: http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matchin...

Save you a click.

Ah, didn't know about that, thanks.

I agree with the points here. Markdown seems like a great idea. Maybe have a toggle for what the post is in (Markdown / Plain text)?

Also I'd like to see a post date on the page.

Finally is it open source?

I agree with having both the post date (optional?) and the markdown option, I like the idea of being able to toggle markdown, you could still default to plain-text and so preserve perfect backwards compatibility. Also I can't help but wonder about expiration dates and the ability to edit or delete, maybe have an optional password?