On 03/24/2012 12:17 AM, Platonides wrote:
On 23/03/12 22:03, Jay Ashworth wrote:
base36 shortnames, all lower case, please.
How does it help? Would you be able to calculate in your mind echo List of episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer | gzip | base64 for any title?
A URL shortener works by assigning and storing a number, counting from 1 and up, to each URL on a first come, first serve basis. The number is written in base 36 (using 10 digits and 26 Latin lowercase letters), so the URL grows like log-36 of the number of stored URLs. The 40th URL might be wi.ki/14 (since 1 * 36 + 4 = 40). By using base36, the first million URLs can be represented by strings of 4 characters, rather than 6 digit decimal numbers. The result is a shorter URL, not a human computable, intuitive transform of the original URL.