Say good-bye to upper case letters in site names

In advance of switching to the new url format, I’ve made it so new users can only use lower case characters in your site id. See the announcement for more info. It made me think though, I wonder if anyone will miss that. I checked the stats and found that there are over 300 people with uppercase letters in their site names. Camel case names are quite popular. Also sites like like myGTD for example. Of course the reason is because the subdomain urls are case insensitive. Does anyone have an opinion either way on losing the upper case letters or on the adoption of subdomain based urls in general? At this stage I’m aiming to eventually decomission the tiddlyspot.com/sitename urls in favour of the new sitename.tiddlyspot.com urls. Will anyone miss those old urls? Is the new url format more or less Web 2.0 cool?

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This entry (permalink) was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 1:08 AM by Simon and categorized in General.

Comments (4) left to “Say good-bye to upper case letters in site names”

  1. JRCapa wrote:

    Hi Simon… I see you got this new thing… monkeyGTD?
    It’s kinda cool, but the layout is a little bit disappointing for those who have played with MonkeyPirateTiddlyWiki, which looks absolutely fantasticly astonishing…
    Also I’d like to know in which language
    tiddlyspot.com is coded.. is it Rails?

    Congrats for your work!

    Posted on 16-Aug-06 at 5:35 am | Permalink

  2. Daniel wrote:

    Hi JRCapa,

    We generally try to avoid writing code as much as we can :) but when we do, it\’s in Ruby. We\’re not using Rails yet (or Og/Nitro, Camping etc), the site is still simple enough not to need a framework.Re your first question, I don\’t want to speak for Simon, but I believe that the MonkeyGTD layout is intended to be fairly minimalist, which seems to be what most folk want in a GTD tool.

    With a little fiddling around, you could combine MonkeyGTD functionality and the MPTW layout if you wanted to. You should ask about it on the TiddlyWiki mailing list, and you\’ll get some good answers.

    Cheers

    ;Daniel

    Posted on 16-Aug-06 at 5:03 pm | Permalink

  3. Dave Garbutt wrote:

    Hi,

    I like the UC letters in my name AND the new style URLs.

    Am I right that if I tell everyone my site is /DaveG.tiddlyspot.com/ they will be directed to /daveg.tiddlyspot.com/? And maybe not notice.

    If so then all I need is a guarantee from you that you will block anyone trying to set up /daveg.tiddlyspot.com/ and take my traffic.

    DaveG (aka daveg)

    PS I am all for lowercase since I read a lot of ee cummings in my teens. I find it avoiding UpperCase so consistently a little sad now :-)

    Posted on 22-Aug-06 at 8:09 pm | Permalink

  4. Daniel wrote:

    Dave, you’re fine to tell people whatever capitalisation you like — the “domain” part of our URLs are case-insensitive (as far as I know, domains in URLs always are).

    That means that our Apache redirect maps DaveG.tiddlyspot.com, daveg.tiddlyspot.com, and DAVEG.tiddlyspot.com all to the same site (tiddlyspot.com/daveg).

    For old sites with capitals in them, like “DaveG”, we made a lowercase link “daveg” that pointed to it, which is why those old sites still work with subdomains.

    Anyway, you can rest assured that noone can make a site the same as yours but with different capitals.

    Cheers

    ;Daniel

    Posted on 22-Aug-06 at 9:06 pm | Permalink

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