Every jot on Jottings gets a simple, 10-digit numeric ID. Something like 1234567890. That's it.
It's inherited from micromusings, the static site generator I built before Jottings. And honestly, it's one of the design decisions I'm most proud of—not because it's clever, but because it's durable.
When you publish a jot, your link looks like this: yourname.jottings.me/1234567890. Twenty years from now, if you point a custom domain at it, your link is still yourdomain.com/1234567890. No migrating slugs. No refactoring URLs. No broken links.
Let me explain why I made this choice and why I think it matters.
The Slug Problem
Most blogging platforms use slugs. You write a title, the system generates a URL-friendly version of it, and that becomes your permalink.
So a jot titled "Building in public is underrated" becomes building-in-public-is-underrated.
Seems sensible. Until it isn't.
What happens when you change the title? Now you have two URLs pointing to the same content, and one is broken. You can set up redirects, but that's infrastructure. That's debt.
What if you publish "Building in public is overrated" three months later? Now you have title collision. Some platforms handle this by appending numbers (building-in-public-is-overrated-2), which is ugly. Others force unique titles, which is restrictive.
Slugs are human-readable, sure. But they're mutable. And on the web, mutability is the enemy of permanence.
The UUID Problem
The other extreme is UUIDs—random 32-character strings like 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000.
They're mathematically unique, globally distributed, and they never collide. Every developer knows them. They're the safe default.
But they're terrible for sharing. Try saying a UUID out loud. Try typing one. Try remembering which jot you wanted to read when someone mentions the UUID.
And they're long. A jot URL with a UUID takes up real estate on your screen and in your browser's search bar. It looks technical, not personal. When you're building the personal web, that matters.
Why 10 Digits?
Numeric IDs are a middle ground.
Ten digits gives you 10 billion unique IDs. That's more than enough for a generation of writers. They're short—six to ten characters instead of thirty-six. They're easy to share (link me jot nine-three-four-two-one actually works). They're typo-resistant.
And here's the key: they're immutable. A jot ID never changes, no matter what you do to the content. Change the title tomorrow, next year, next decade—the ID stays the same.
Your link is permanent.
Learning from Twitter
Twitter actually solved this elegantly with Snowflake IDs, which are 64-bit integers distributed across a cluster. They're unique, sortable, and encoded with timestamps so you can tell when something was posted just by looking at the ID.
Jottings doesn't need that complexity. Single-digit IDs are simpler and serve the same purpose for a personal site: a unique, memorable, permanent identifier.
What matters is that the link never breaks. Your jots are yours. Your words deserve URLs that stick around.
The Micromusings Heritage
I didn't invent this. micromusings used numeric IDs from day one. It's a design choice that stuck because it worked. It was simple. It was resilient.
When I built Jottings, I asked myself: what should I carry forward from micromusings? It wasn't the templating engine. It wasn't the static-site-generation approach (though that's still there under the hood).
It was the philosophy. Keep it simple. Make it permanent. Don't let infrastructure get in the way of writing.
Numeric IDs embody that. A 10-digit number is the simplest identifier that works at scale. It's short enough to remember, unique enough to never collide, and permanent enough to outlast whatever platform you publish on.
Other Details You're Probably Wondering About
Can I customize my jot URLs? Not the numeric ID, but you can add a custom domain. Your jot will be yourdomain.com/1234567890. That's a lot better than a third-party subdomain.
What if I want pretty URLs? The ID is pretty, in its own way. It's minimal. Clean. And it doesn't leak information about your writing process (you don't know how many jots I've published just by looking at the ID).
Is this a limitation? Not if you're used to short URLs. Personally, I think jottings.me/1234567890 is easier to share than jottings.me/my-long-title-here. It's shorter. It's cleaner. It's more like how Twitter works (pre-URLs, they had numeric Tweet IDs too).
The Point
The best design decisions are the ones you don't notice. You publish a jot. You get a link. The link works. Twenty years from now, someone clicks that link and it still works.
That's the whole idea.
Numeric IDs make that possible. They're simple, they're permanent, and they let you focus on what matters: the writing.
If you're building something that lasts, consider what you can make unchangeable. Your ID is a good place to start.
Want to try it? Start a free Jottings site and publish your first jot. You'll get your own 10-digit ID and a link that'll work forever.