It just seems to me like relevant, interesting questions get closed all the time because just because. It's getting pretty annoying from the StackExchange network.
For human-friendly URIs, I would've liked to see Doug Crockford's Base32 encoding (http://www.crockford.com/wrmg/base32.html) instead of hexadecimal. Case-insensitive, but still more compact than hex.
Another handy trick is to drop vowels, which only costs 6 characters (with y), and greatly reduces the chance that your url will include a noticeable profanity or other undesirable word.
The problem with Base32 encodings is that there are so many of them. (I say this as a fan who promoted Base32 in a number of uses, and wish the proliferation of encodings could have been avoided.)
For example, Crockford's is different from both of the variants defined in IETF RFC 4648 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4648#section-6). For comparison, the digits sets for 0-31 are:
There are even others. Each had locally-reasonable reasons for their variation at the time.
I used the 1st row approach, in the SHA1 identifiers at Bitzi and in the original 'magnet:' proposal, because it had also been documented in an earlier IETF RFC for other purposes, and is perhaps best for anyplace where human sight-reading/handwriting could confuse certain digits. But the 2nd-row variant is easiest for encoding/decoding, and the 2nd/3rd row variants have some sorting benefits (the encoded versions sort in the same order as the raw binary versions).
I've grown more and more into thinking having a database is maybe overkill for only a blog. I do use Octopress too and it really makes you think "do you really need a DB for that?"
If you compile your posts into HTML, use Javascript for more dynamic content (like comments by Disqus or a Twitter feed, for example), HTML files take almost no resources to serve, so you can handle a huge load without many resources.
Ironically, it sounds exactly like what Apple is doing with iOS/iPhone. "All our apps should come from the app store because we review them and blah" Considering Android's position of "you can install APKs, but at your risk," I find this bizarre. Is Google slowly becoming Apple?
Not really for ratios. If there's a min and a max, sliders make sense.
You can make a better argument for a knob if you have an unbounded range, or an effectively unbounded one (making small adjustments on a large scale). Think old iPods.
I just tried my home number and the name it came up with was 'Nova Scotia'. My landline provider is based in Halifax, but I'm in PEI. I'm kind of used to that, though :)
