Stay Hungry

If I wanted to tweet about a silly magnifier glass iPhone application, today I could tweet

What a pointless iPhone app http://bit.ly/172F9b !

But that uses too many characters just on the shortened URL without expressing anything!  We should be succinct and stop wasting random letters on bit.ly’s unique id:

What a http://bit.ly/pointless_iPhone_app!

Now that’s a nice (and short!) URL.  bit.ly is 6 characters.  The unique id they use (in this example 172F9b) is also 6 characters.  By dumping the unique id entirely and allowing custom text in the URL, bit.ly would waste only half as many characters and become an integral part of the message.

It’s a fairly simple idea (and technique): when your user mouses over some text, you update it to show a little more information.  This is very useful when you want to keep your design clean with simple copy, but a curious user might want some more information.  Put your mouse over “Hello” for an example.

Hello

The HTML is super simple (thanks to prototype.js):

<h3 onmouseout="this.update('Hello')" onmouseover="this.update('Hello, my name is Dan.')">Hello</h3>

And a little Rails helper method goes a long way toward cleaning up your views.

def mouseover_update_tag(regular_text, mouseover_text, options = {})
   tag_type = (options.delete(:tag) || 'span').to_s
   options.merge!( { :onmouseover => "this.update('#{escape_javascript(mouseover_text)}')",
                     :onmouseout => "this.update('#{escape_javascript(regular_text)}')" } )
   return "#{tag(tag_type, options, true)}#{regular_text}</#{tag_type}>"
end