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go-shorten: URL Shortener Service

This service stores and serves URL redirects. I stole the idea from when I worked at LinkedIn who apparently stole it from Google.

Why?

By itself, a shared URL shortening service is stupid useful. Want to visit a thing? Type go/thing into your browser and hit enter.

It is honestly little things like this make everyone's life far easier.

How do people use this?

Where I work we generally follow a pattern of go/$thing should take you to whatever $thing is. Here are a few examples:

It is perfectly fine to have duplication, the goal is that all the different ways folks think will all be taken to the right place.

You can also do fancier things like:

Okay, how do I set this up?

Roughly, to make this work:

  1. Build and host go-shorten somewhere
  2. Setup a DNS entry to point to it (e.g. go.corp.example.com)
  3. Configure any clients you have to include corp.example.com in their DNS search suffix list
  4. Troubleshoot :P

Credits

I forked this project from https://github.com/didip/shawty because I liked how they laid out their project but I wanted to add a bunch more features and productionize it a bit more than was within scope for the original project.