While the rest of us were copy-and-pasting mumbo-jumbo from URL shorteners into our Twitter accounts, sites like The New York Times were smugly tweeting their links using shortened URLs like "nyti.ms." Frankly, this made me a little jealous πββοΈ
That's why I created my own freaking url shortener with pure JavaScript + HTML + CSS β€
Did I mention this is all free of charge and 100% open source? Yes.
mnml URL makes it easy for the average Joe developer to create a custom URL shortener for free and deploy it to GitHub π You don't even need to own a site that gets about 17 million unique visitors per month π
Let's get started.
step 0: Goto jsonstore.io Click the purple COPY button to copy your endpoint.
step 2: IMPORTANT: Find var endpoint on src/head.js file and replace it with your own endpoint which you copied from step 0.
var endpoint = "https://www.jsonstore.io/6b6xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa98";
replace it with your endpoint π
step 3: Goto your repo settings > GitHub pages. Select master branch as source for deployment.
That's it! Site will be hosted on your_github_username.github.io/mnmlurl/src
EDIT 0: Minimal URL can be hosted on any website hosting services like GitHub/GitLab pages, Firebase/Heroku hosting, yoursite.com, etc. For hosting in such custom domains, Its advised to npm build and upload output folder. Hosting on GitHub pages was just for proof of concept.
EDIT 1: If you want to take development further, consider contributing on GitHub.
EDIT 2: IMPORTANT: Minimal URL is an experimental project. Don't shorten sensitive contents/URLs with it. jsonstore.io endpoints are always public making shortened URLs visible for everyone.
If you want a heads up on my next projects, or just want to chat about the web, life and happiness make sure to follow me @liyasthomas on Twitter π. If any of my projects helped you please consider making a donation.