From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2005-03-15T00:35:06+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyURL.com

Robby Russell wrote:
> I felt like giving myself a small project to get my feet a bit more wet
> with a small project in Rails
> 
> http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/read/7
> 
> resulted in having this up a few hours later:
> 
> http://rubyurl.com/

Nice.  I noticed, though, that you do not get the same rubyURL for the 
same source URL each time you do a conversion.    I'm guessing then 
there is no straightforward has mapping going on.

Would this sort of 1-to-1 mapping be useful?    Two arguments come to mind:

1. Multiple use of the same source URL would not consume additional 
space on each conversion; once a URL is entered, the same RubyURL is reused.

2.  If a predictable hashing system is used that assures each source URL 
maps to only one Ruby URL, and that algorithm is published, then people 
can manually decode Ruby URLs if need be (should, say, the site go 
away).  For example, if you see this:
   http://rubyurl.com/2OJCU

you should be able to reverse-engineer it to this
   http://www.ruby-doc.org/


Anyways, thanks for the site.

James