About
Where this came from, how the arithmetic works, and what links and cards keep.
In February 2018 Jamie Thingelstad wrote “Your Version Number”, borrowing an idea from his friend David Hussman: track your age the way software tracks releases. He was on 4.6.52 at the time. This site is that post, made clickable.
The birthday arithmetic
The day they turn 53 they ship 5.3.0 — a minor bump, backwards-compatible. At 60 it is 6.0.0, a major release. February 29 birthdays get March 1 in non-leap years, and future dates are skipped rather than counted backwards.
The work arithmetic
The Work Edition anchors on a start date. YEARS is completed years of tenure. QUARTERS is which quarter of the current tenure year you are in, counted in three-month steps from the start date rather than from January — start on February 10 and Q1 begins May 10. DAYS counts Monday through Friday after the quarter starts; there is no holiday calendar. A quarter starts at zero. If an anniversary or quarter date falls beyond the end of a month, it rolls into the following month: three months after January 31 is May 1. Dates and daily updates use the viewer’s local calendar.
Ordinary views and saved cards
On /birthday/ and /work/, the names, dates, and selected theme are read from the URL. Editing these views does not create a saved card record. Bookmark the URL to return to the same people or roles; their numbers are calculated again from the viewer’s local date.
Creating a card saves it on our server. Its record contains the recipient’s name, birthday or work start date, occasion, theme, note, sender name, link code, creation date, and expiry time. The card record does not include an email address, account, or IP address.
The composer keeps your draft in the page until you press Create the card. That button saves the record and returns a link such as /c/abc234. The link looks up the saved card; its contents are not encoded in the URL. Cards cannot be edited after creation.
Records are marked for expiry 400 days after creation. Automatic deletion may happen later, so this is not an exact cutoff for access. Copies and cached link previews can remain after the record is removed.
Card pages do not load our analytics script. They ask search engines not to index them using noindex; that is not access control. Anyone with the link can read the card and forward it to someone else.
Sharing and analytics
Ordinary view links expose the names and dates in their URL. Card links give access to the saved card, including its date and note. Neither kind of link requires a login. Links can appear in browser history, bookmarks, and history sync, and anyone you share with can pass them on. Use information you are comfortable sharing.
Outside card pages, Tinylytics receives visit counts and interactions such as theme selections and link copies. The analytics requests have the query string and fragment removed from their page URL and referrer fields, excluding the names and dates in ordinary view links. This filtering applies to analytics; it does not make a shared URL private.
Each edition keeps one local-storage flag to remember whether its intro has been shown. Names, dates, themes, and card drafts are not saved in local storage.
Themes
Twenty-eight themes, each one a single standalone stylesheet with no JavaScript — a deliberate restriction, because a theme that could run code could also read the dates in the URL and send them somewhere. Anything a theme needs comes from seven generic hooks in the core. Browse them in the gallery, or see them carrying real people.