itty.bitty.site

itty.bitty takes html (or other data), compresses it into a URL fragment, and provides a link that can be shared. When it is opened, it inflates that data on the receiver’s side.

Learn more at about.bitty.site

Detailed workings how.bitty.site

Advanced

Handcrafted HTML files

Drag one into the editor to convert it.

Using Codepen.io (Pro Accounts)

Paste a codepen URL into the editor. Get started with a template or look at some samples. This must be a Pro account to work.

Hosting

One simple way to host is to forward a domain. Just paste the itty.bitty url in the redirect.

Generating links programmatically

Encoding (Mac)

echo -n 'hello world' | lzma -9 | base64 | xargs -0 printf "https://itty.bitty.site/#/%s\n"

Encoding (Linux)

echo -n 'hello world' | lzma -9 | base64 -w0 | xargs -0 printf "https://itty.bitty.site/#/%s\n"

Encoding (Win Git/WSL)

echo -n 'hello world' | xz --format=lzma -9 | base64 -w0 | printf "https://itty.bitty.site/#/%s\n" "$(cat -)"

Encoding (Python)

'https://itty.bitty.site/#/'+base64.b64encode(lzma.compress(bytes("hello world",encoding="utf-8"), format=lzma.FORMAT_ALONE, preset=9)).decode("utf-8")

Encoding (Node.js)

'https://itty.bitty.site/#/'+Buffer.from(lzma.compress("Hello World", 9)).toString('base64')

Decoding (Mac)

echo -n "[URL]" | sed -E 's/^.*#[^\/]*\/\??//g' | base64 -D | lzma -d

Decoding (Linux)

echo -n "[URL]" | sed -E 's/^.*#[^\/]*\/\??//g' | base64 -d | lzma -d

Decoding (Win Git/WSL)

echo -n "[URL]" | sed 's/^.*#[^\/]*\///g' | base64 -d | xz --format=lzma -d

Size Limits

While most sites support 2000 bytes, some can handle more. Maximum sizes for links in various apps & Browsers (approximate, size in bytes)

App	Max bytes	Notes
Twitter	4,088
Slack	4,000
Discord	4,000
iMessage	4,000	URLs with more than 300 nonbreaking characters in a row will be split. LZMA compression usually fixes this, but raw data urls may fail.
QR Code	2,953
Bitly	2,048
Browser
Google Chrome (win)	32,779
(mac)	Lots	Only shows 10,000
Firefox	>64,000
Microsoft IE 11	4,043	Only shows 2,083
Microsoft Edge	2,083	Anything over 2083 will fail
Android	8,192
Safari	Lots	Only shows 5211

IB V.2 features (https://itty.bitty.app)

Compression formats

IB2 supports Gzip and Brotli compression. Gzip will be used in lieu of lzma if it yields a smaller result. Client side brotli compression is not implemented. Compression type will be inferred from the first few bytes of data if not specified

brotli

echo -n 'hello world' | brotli | base64 | xargs -0 printf "https://itty.bitty.app/#/%s\n"

gzip

echo -n 'hello world' | gzip -9 | base64 | xargs -0 printf "https://itty.bitty.app/#/%s\n"

Encryption

Encrypted content will prompt for a password before decoding. Encryption type should be specified with cipher=\[aes|des|...];.

echo -n 'hello world' | gzip -9 | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc | base64 | xargs -0 printf "https://itty.bitty.app//data:text/plain;cipher=aes;gzip64,%s\n"

Open Graph metadata

Title, description, and image can be included as path components before the # fragment. If present, these will be rendered as the preview data.

https://itty.bitty.app/Title_text/Description_text/https://example.com/image.png/#/DATA

An emoji can be specified in lieu of an image url: https://itty.bitty.app/Title_text/Description_text/🤓#/DATA

Note: Including this metadata requires serverside rendering - the body of the content will still be rendered clientside.

Custom data renderers

Itty bitty app supports custom renderers for structured data. Recipes and bookmarklets are special cased currently, but any renderer can be implemented by specifying a render attribute (render=https://script_url.js;) within the data URL.

Recipes

Recipes use a ld+json format, which is commonly found on many recipe sites - these can be extracted using the bookmarklet at https://bookmarklet.bitty.site

#/data:application/ld+json;base64,RECIPE_JSON

Bookmarklets

Javascript bookmarklets are displayed with basic instructions for how to add them to your browser : https://itty.bitty.app/#Show_Alert/javascript:alert('hello')