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Show HN: Yo.link – Subdomain based URL shortener
I was looking for a pet project to try out recent additions to https://vercel.com 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://svelte4.yo.link --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOXq89h8saI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOXq89h8saI
https://hn.yo.link https://hn.yo.link --> https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/
https://longest-url-ever.yo.link https://longest-url-ever.yo.link --> https://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/ 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 (support@yo.link)