An Itty Bitty Post

As we casually dip our toes back into regular posting after a week to accommodate the midweek American holiday + realities of summer, it makes sense to start out small . . . itty bitty, in fact. itty bitty is a service that renders a web page–even an entire (simple) app–entirely within the link itself.

In other words, this link contains within it the first paragraph of Paul Clifford, compressed via the Lempel-Ziv-Markov algorithm, which if you tell me is a real thing I’ll believe you.

The ingenuity of itty bitty is that nothing is stored on the server: The entirety of the web page is contained in the URL, encoded and compressed. It will hold about a page of text, emoji, or ASCII characters. Despite/because of its simplicity, there are already some pretty cool examples. As these examples suggest, in addition to doing light editing directly on the itty bitty site itself, you can also drop HTML files directly onto it for conversion in this format.

What might you make with a server-free microsite? Let us know in comments!

Photo “Dippin’ his toes in the water” by Flickr user m01229 / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0