I was looking for a pet project to try out recent additions to <a href="https://vercel.com" rel="nofollow">https://vercel.com</a> 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...<p>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.<p>Here are some examples:<p><a href="https://svelte4.yo.link" rel="nofollow">https://svelte4.yo.link</a> --> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOXq89h8saI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOXq89h8saI</a><p><a href="https://hn.yo.link" rel="nofollow">https://hn.yo.link</a> --> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/</a><p><a href="https://longest-url-ever.yo.link" rel="nofollow">https://longest-url-ever.yo.link</a> --> <a href="https://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogo...</a><p>I couldn't find any other shorteners that use this approach, hence wanted to build one.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 (support@yo.link)