Custom URL shortener

[h0b0]

I recently changed companies and one thing that is driving me insane is having to manage bookmarks. At my last company we had a custom URL shortener which I hope I can recreate here.

For example, instead of bookmarking the url for the training site you could put in the browser url/training. This meant you did not have to manage bookmarks. The other nice thing was being able to research topics with little info by guessing other people's links. If you needed to find out info on pay days you could type url/pay and almost certainly a useful site would come back.

Is there anything like this on the market to down load?

[h0b0]

Thanks for the replies. The URL shortener I used to use would allow me (or anyone) to specify the new url and not generate a bunch of random letters.

Using the example above, instead of bookmarking the entire url for the training site, I typed url/learning. For the home page I could type url/home. It meant no bookmarking required.

[h0b0]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

The bit you are missing is that, at my previous company it wasn’t limited to the “tags” I had made. Based on the topic I was researching I could guess “tags” that would lead me to relevant sites. In a work environment where there are many sources of information being able to jump to the site (even ones you hadn’t been to before or knew existed) was very convenient.

Perhaps the usecase for what I’m looking for is niche and limited to the type of company I find myself working at. When I described the function to my new colleagues, they all agreed it would help them immensely.

[bigandclever]

Are we talking about vanity URLs? Or a version thereof.

[h0b0]

That’s closer. But, a vanity URL would look like,

www.facebook.com/h0b0

Without being told the url existed you would not stumble across it. What I’m used to is

url/h0b0

That would lead to the relevant info. I wouldn’t have to know about Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace. I could look for info on h0b0 by typing url/h0b0.

It is particularly useful at work because even the best search engines struggle with finding information on confluence, Sharepoint and JIRA without going to each one. In the case of large companies, they may have multiple JIRA instances and they are impossible to search as a whole. Let’s say I want to know about Kafka issues, I can either search through 20 JIRA databases or type url/kafkajira and almost certainly someone else will have set up that link.

[ging84]

url shorteners take a potentially very long url and condense it into a very short code, that someone could type, or fit into a tweet or sms message, the short url would trigger a redirect to the full url.

The human readable paths you describe are more in the realm of clean urls and aliases. There are lots of features of lots of platforms that do this sort of stuff, but you'll need to be more specific on what you are trying to do.

It's not very clear who is setting these urls, is it the content editor, an admin, or general users finding and sharing content ? And is the content loading on the url you type, or redirecting to another url?

[ging84]

when you say
url/kafkajira
do you mean that literally
or is 'url/' a placeholder for you company's intranet domain?

[h0b0]

It wasn’t literally “url”/name. At the last place, they were called “X” links (still not exactly what they were called but you get my gist). You would type x/h0b0 in the address bar and it would be resolved to the full url.

[BigTZ4M]

You can do this with YOURLS https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS

You’ll need a domain name and a web server always accessible with the necessary software to support running it.

[h0b0]

Cool. Thank you everyone

[h0b0]

I might not be explaining it properly but there’s no searching and no list for me to look through. There’s no going to a site and plugging something in.

In fact, having to search in any form defeats the purpose.

[h0b0]

I do understand what you are saying but this for an enterprise environment where the person creating the link should be the authoritative source. That means the “I’m feeling lucky” should work and prevent you from being weighed down by the 1,333,444,555 other “related” links.