Espressostories.com was designed by Chris Worth and R.P Bird after a few months tossing emails and ideas around. It launched in 2003 and has quietly become the web's largest site about the shortest literature, getting up to 150,000 pageviews a month.

  The site's a lightweight database-backed web application coded by Niina Talikka. It uses the MySQL database, with PHP doing the fetching and carrying. The pages are fully XHTML and CSS compliant. (Read the CSS.) It's hosted by Paul Makepeace's Realprogrammers.

  Espresso is changing - with a new look for 2007 and some new features being coded up. We've made the design simpler and easier to read, cleaned up some code, and there's a raft of new ideas on the drawing board. The first of these ideas is a leaderboard of the top 100 stories which was coded by Alfred Armstrong of LikeMind Web Services.

  The URLs on this site are bookmarkable. Feel free to deep link to stories or authors, from anywhere you like.