umu

Personal shortlink generator

Features

Links are …

• Editable
• Removable
• Four characters long (26 uppercase letters + 26 lowercase letters + 10 numbers = 14,776,336 possible shortened URLs)

Service has …

• A simple API
• A simple web UI
• A simple backup procedure (database is a single file)
• No user management (this is a personal service after all)

But … why?

Good question. URL shorteners are (usually) terrible and useless. Except when used correctly :thinkingsmart:

I take a lot of hand-written notes on things and, having both a passion for and job in IT, my notes would be much more useful if they included links to the things I'm writing about. However, there's no way I'm going to hand-write a 50+ character URL.

That's where URL shorteners come in!

Most shortener services I've found that are both open source and self-hosted use something like 6-character-long paths for the link as they're meant for use by multiple people; 14.8m possible URLs (your cap with 4 character paths) aren't enough for public services.

Six characters is fine but why write six characters when you could write four :D

Also, why deal with user management and a relational database when you're only going to have one user and a bunch of keys with values :D

I also had a case of the typical "programmer unsatisfied with the {language|tech stack|license|feature set|all of the above}, wants to make something better" problem. I'm not a big fan of Node, PHP is ok, Python is meh, big relational database is unnecessary, heavy frontend is unnecessary, complex backend is unnecessary, I don't care about link tracking, click counts, link referrers, geo-location of visitors, etc., etc., etc.

All this put together, I decided I would be best served by using this as an opportunity to learn more Go and write my own thing that does nothing more than what I want need :)