Damn Small Link Forwarder (DSLF): a bit.ly replacement written in rust
10 points by vpetersson
10 points by vpetersson
I don’t know why people still use these, the worst kind of link rot.
I actually really like internal links being of the form go/mail or go/trello to go to my mail hosting or standard trello board. You control the DNS, so something short is easy to set up. Also, it’s pretty nice when HR changes your learning system and go/learn works with the new one. Our system at work allows group ownership, and this one would obviously allow anyone with access to the source control of the csv to update it, so it’s different, but still possibly useful.
What do you do with link rot in that direction?
Yeah we do this for training videos. Short links that always lead to the most up to date video. One of them has a little language selection page for when we shoot different videos for different countries.
That’s internal stuff though. Still not keen on link shorteners in general.
I’ve started asking our people to use one (that we control/manage internally) as a kind of anti link-rot measure. Some of our people routinely send out links to members of the public. And some of these links point to vendor-managed SaaS that:
and
Replacing that vendor is a lengthy process. Standing up a link shortener that we own completely, on one of our own domains, took me a couple of days. When we do replace the SaaS, it will be easy to stop our links that we’ve sent out from breaking. If we used direct links instead, it is certain they will break in the short to medium term.
As a bonus, more than once I’ve been able to retarget the shortener when one particular individual sent out a link to a draft in our CMS instead of a permanent link.
I agree with you when it comes to shorteners people don’t control themselves, but I’ve found them extremely useful for stopping links from breaking.
We use them for QR codes to reduce the data. The longer the link, the less readable the QR code is.
How long url:s do you put in qr, and what do they contain? I would guess https://domain.com/foo?qr=abc123 would be plenty, and not need too many pixels. But perhaps I don’t have enough imagination what to put in there…
It’s common to use UTM parameters to track campaigns etc too, so this makes the URLs fairly long.
I was about to make a sarcastic comment that there’s no way in hell that we could possibly leave out the 20 UTM spyware params the company demands.
Ah. Google should have a short form of those, I suppose. And everyone should use locally hosted analytics, of course, but I don’t see that happening soon.
Agreed… for shortening as a service. If it’s something like http://myblog.com/?id=2153, or a “by the same company it leads to” like redd.it or youtu.be, then it’s a net benefit.
…especially if it’s something like youtu.be where it’ll be easy to match up shortened links and long links if the shortener goes away.
For one, it’s convenient for ephemeral IRC or SMS messages.
So you need to copy/paste multiple URLs instead of just using the original URL. Still can’t see the value, and at least here, there’s no real cost to sending a long SMS nowadays. Even Twitter fixed that limit years ago.
So you need to copy/paste multiple URLs instead of just using the original URL.
I don’t follow you here.
In my example I am thinking in the context of automated URL shortening. Say, to send system monitoring alerts which may contain long URLs to monitoring dashboards, log queries, etc. They tend to include tons of query parameters like timestamps and metric names. Ever used Grafana? It comes with a built-in URL shortener for that reason. These long URLs are eyesores and may end up hard-wrapped in plain-text emails, IRC, terminal-based apps, etc. It’s so bad, there are even small utilities to help scrap long URLs out.
Sorry, but “at least here” and Twitter is not a fair representative view.
I have one too, its pretty poor by any means but I was disappointed by what else I found, so writing my own seemed easier, and it was.
The problem space is so simple I might actually suggest that everyone roll their own, thanks to the great webserver frameworks that exist.
Or by using rewrite rules in Apache (if you are running it), no additional framework required.
I’ve recently started using GitHub Pages with an HTML redirect template when I would otherwise want a link shortener. Has the benefit that you can (sort of) prove to people that you’re not tracking their requests (though of course Microsoft probably is).
This is a useful property for me since the main thing I wanted to have a short link for is my personal contact/feedback form, which intentionally lets people send me things anonymously - it’s not great if they think I might be logging their IP or something.
You can see the code (with only one active short link) at https://w-r.me/ (which uses the redirect trick to send you to the GitHub repo itself)
I used to do something similar. But it works really poorly. Kinda fine for an end user on the web, but breaks anything automated since it’s not omitting proper redirects (301/302 or 307/308).