I'm surprised nobody has attempted to put the content in the URL yet (to display on a static page with styling using JS [needs a tag filter...] to insert an URL parameter into some node). It would accommodate at least 2KB of text, local caching and fast hosting all in one.
I was always quite fascinated by the concept, but I suspect liability and lack of control over the content is a fatal issue and why nothing much seemed to come from it.
If someone makes a 'bad' page, which is inevitable, the domain with the hashify/shortly code would be held responsible and the only way the site owner could 'remove' the content would be to stop the service.
> Storing a document in a URL is nifty, but not terribly practical. Hashify uses the [bit.ly API][4] to shorten URLs from as many as 30,000 characters to just 20 or so. In essence, bit.ly acts as a document store! [1]
bit.ly et al. seem to be able to get away with being agnostic processors. I'm surprised there haven't been more stories about their services being abused.
Thinking through this, it seems like content-in-URL would work for a website with a single page or a small number of pages, but would limited by the fact that links from one content-in-URL page to another content-in-URL page require content from both pages to be encoded in the first page’s URL. If you have pages linking to pages linking to pages, this cascades into requiring content from all pages encoded in the home page URL.
I guess I'm a bit late to the party, but after reading your comment I hacked something together - https://x.rukin.me It's ugly and I haven't spent any time styling it or improving editor(it's just textarea) but it works as PoC.
Also I've started it before I read comments that hashify exists, otherwise I would probably not do it ;)
Compared to hashify:
- it uses zlib to compress data, so it can actually contain much more content(if it's repetitive)
- it also supports password encryption of the content (don't know why, but my friend said it would be cool)
- only supports markdown(no html) as I haven't found any good js lib for html sanitization on client side
This has been done, iirc. I think it was HN where I saw it a couple years back. I couldn't find it today if I wanted to, but it's definitely been done.
