hashify

Bookmark the bit.ly URL, perhaps?

Markdown > HTML

Just sayin' ;)

You, my friend, are one sick individual. Very cool!

It's interesting that you say that. For some reason I felt under immense pressure to get this out quickly, but I wrote that off as paranoia (should've heeded Kurt's warning).

Now that it _is_ out in the wild, I can't wait to see what people do with it slash build upon it.

A month ago, all the developers in the office spent two days working on interesting small projects, the idea being that at the end of that time we'd have a bunch of cool shippable features. Though it was encouraged to work on useful, sensible things, this was not a requirement.

Anyway, I felt great until 4pm on the Friday, when we presented our creations. Afterwards, I felt flat (as one often does after meeting a deadline or finishing a series of exams). I didn't want the excitement to end.

As I was walking home I had an idea. For some reason I wanted to share thoughts in 72pt Helvetica. I didn't want to broadcast them (I was melancholic after all), but I felt compelled to express them visually.

I began to think about how this might be done. The Web seemed like the obvious platform. I wondered whether it could be done without a database. I remembered something I had heard on a podcast about a site that allowed one play musical notes on a computer keyboard, and would encode these in the URL for easy playback.

This seemed a lot more interesting than sharing my moody thoughts, and now that I had something cool to work on I no longer felt the need to do so anyway.

I think I spent 40 hours working on it that first weekend (yes, I was consumed). I truly believed that I could ship it before showering and leaving for work on Monday! Doing so would have been a mistake – I'm pleased that I spent several weeks ironing out the kinks and integrating with bit.ly and Twitter.

bit.ly is the only URL shortening service to support cross-origin resource sharing, as far as I'm aware.

The _right_ thing to do would be to build a shortening service designed to handle URLs of arbitrary length. I'm not sure that I'm willing to take on that responsibility, though.

> Nice hack, though odd name given that no hashing occurs.

When I registered the domain I imagined that state would be stored in a Twitter-style hashbang. Thanks to `history.pushState` and `history.replaceState`, this hack is not required in modern browsers. :)

> Hashify.me seems to be overloaded for the moment.

Here's what I'm seeing in my browser console:

{ "data": [ ], "status_code": 403, "status_txt": "RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED" }

I should have included appropriate error handling for this! Everything except shortening continues to function, though.

> That's a feature.

Agreed! One can always link someone to a static HTML page with <script>alert('fu')</script> in the body, but no one would tag that "XSS".

Does hashify.me make it easier to send annoying alert messages to your friends? Sure. Annoying, but no more harmful than sending them to the static equivalent.

> they'd just send down a small bit of constant Javascript that rebuilds the page from the #fragment.

That's _exactly_ what the site does. Everything happens client-side. nginx serves a single index.html for every request. ;)

> I assume hashify.me stores the value associated with the hash.

Not so. hashify.me has no server-side component (beyond nginx serving three static files). _bit.ly_ kindly provides the hash table. ;)