Show HN: Yo.link – Subdomain based URL shortener

7 points

3 years ago

I was looking for a pet project to try out recent additions to https://vercel.com platform, specifically their PostreSQL and Redis offering. They also provide easy to setup wildcard subdomain HTTPS certificates, and since I had yo.link domain lying around for a while, why not use it to create, yes, yet another, URL shortening service, but with a twist...

Putting the user-selectable short-code in the subdomain has the advantage that it is the first thing that users read in a URL, and as such it is an opportunity to provide some contextual information about the link.

Here are some examples:

https://svelte4.yo.link --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOXq89h8saI

https://hn.yo.link --> https://news.ycombinator.com/

https://longest-url-ever.yo.link --> https://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogo...

I couldn't find any other shorteners that use this approach, hence wanted to build one.

Redis is great for counting realtime clicks, sliced by hour, day, month, country/city and user browser. PostgreSQL is used as master DB to host the short-code destination-link mapping, and for user management.

I plan to add some extra features, like: - tagging the links so it is easy to search and categorise. - password protect the links. - separate analytics for QR code visits.

Please let me know what you think. Any ideas, suggestions or critic is very welcome. If you are interested in collaborating on such a project, please let me know ([email protected])

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