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Comment by wickchuck | Hacker News Reader

Where is the data for this stored? I was inspecting and didn't see anything in Local Storage, Session Storage, nothing on the network tab. Hit refresh thought everything would be wiped, but all my data was still there!

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It appears to be stored in the url. As you update the cells there's an encoded # variable that, when removed, wipes the table.

But... URLs have a char length limit :x

And this has a cell limit. Perfectly aligned.

And if you put the URL into a URL shortener, you can (ab)use it as cloud storage for your spreadsheet.

I once did some checks and found at least one shortener could store a URL string of at least 65KB [1]. That was in 2009. Not sure where those shortener limits are all at today - I suspect the industry dynamics changed when Twitter introduced its built-in shortener.

1. https://softwareas.com/the-url-shortener-as-a-cloud-database...

The limits are definitely shorter now. I also checked when I created URL Pages [0], which hosts entire web pages in the URL.

However there is a link shortener that is quietly hosted by GitHub called https://git.io that doesn't seem to have a length limit as far as I've discovered. [1]

0: https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages

1: https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/git-io

Think it gets encoded into the URL as it changes when you enter something. Also you are able to send that link to someone while visiting just https://tinysheet.com/ again gives a blank.

That’s actually a really useful feature. Nice.

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