Itty Bitty

Notes and Observations.

After experimenting with Itty Bitty for a while I've discovered some interesting and relevant points.

After creating a simple text page, saving it, then sharing the URL [using the link capture facility] all worked as expected and when I used the saved URL the original text page appeared on screen [as expected] - however when I used the 'edit' facility to add more information that too worked o.k. but when I revisited using the same URL only the original [and not the changed] text page was displayed. This led me to think that when using the 'edit' facility the original URL is somehow modified to create a new version of the page containing the updates.

My testing is ongoing, but so far I've confirmed that when you apply changes the original 'root' URL is indeed extended [in some cases producing another URL with a very large path name] that you need to save / use / share in order to access the updated information. 

In other words "making changes" = "a completely new version of your information with a different URL"

    N.B. This means you need to remember to save the URL again, or recover it from the 'History' section in your browser.

Meet Itty Bitty — "A better way to share information" — extracts from original by JR Raphael

Itty Bitty can be great for anyone who ever shares information on the internet - which pretty much means all of us.

The easiest way to think of Itty Bitty is as a super-easy way to build a simple web page — quite literally in seconds — although the simple web page is not really a full Site, but it acts like one.

You just pop open the Site and start typing, using very basic text formatting if you like, and that's pretty much it.

When you're finished, you can copy the link to your creation (or even generate a QR code for it, if you're feeling smart) and share it with anyone. Your information is, quite literally, an Itty Bitty Site, and it'll look the same no matter what device you use open it.

N.B. If you later return to 'edit' your original work a new URL is generated as part of the 'edit' process so you need to repeat the above steps.

What is really special about this way of holding information [as opposed to many other web based note taking applications] is the fact that your data doesn't exist on any server or anywhere on the web. 

Rather, it's contained entirely in the link or QR code and then turned into a neat looking page on demand every time it's opened.

You don't have to worry about the privacy of your data, in other words, because the data lives only in that link or QR code and is thus only accessible by yourself or visible to anyone you choose to share it with. Pretty impressive, right?

You can read the full technical explanation of how that all works here (in an Itty Bitty Site, naturally), but the short version is that everything you type into the Itty Bitty editing page gets compressed into binary code and then converted into a string of characters that works as a regular web link.

Some things you could do with a your Itty Bitty Site ...

• You could spin one up in seconds as a way to hold more info than you could fit into a tweet or other social media post, then simply share the link on said social media service.

• You could create an incredibly simple note or list to share with a group or even for your own future reference and then pass the link along to anyone who needs it.

• You could dump over excerpts from an article or a book (or even a poem!) to share with others or revisit yourself later. If you paste something over that has links or any other HTML formatting, Itty Bitty will automatically convert it for you.

• You could whip up an invitation, a recipe, a collection of links or locations, or most anything else imaginable with virtually no effort and then send it to friends, family, or whoever in a way that couldn't be any easier for them to open and view. And you could rest easy knowing that it won't live on in any permanent, discoverable way (beyond the link itself) on the web.

The possibilities here are practically limitless. If you know your way around code and really want to get ambitious, you can even use Itty Bitty to create simple programs — like this completely browser-based calculator.

All in all, this is one of the most clever concepts I've [the author JR Raphael] ever come across, and it has the potential to be an endlessly useful tool in your virtual box of tricks.

One final note about this creation: The guy who made it, perhaps not surprisingly, is a former Googler who served as a principal designer on the Material Design team for more than a decade. He left Google for Dropbox in 2017 and then moved from Dropbox to Oculus in 2020.

Amazing to think this was just a random little experiment he cooked up in his free time — an Itty Bitty way to add a pinch of extra value onto the internet and show off just how cool technology can be.