[kwlug-disc] Link shortener advice

[Paul Nijjar]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 12:51:54AM -0400, Chris Frey wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 09:17:29PM -0400, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> > Personally, I think using a link shortener is the best of a set of
> > bad options. Thus my question stands. What should I do to get the least
> > worst link shortening option?
> 
> Having never relied on url shorteners, I don't have a lot of tips, but
> this strikes me as a basic problem to solve, and I'd probably start
> by hacking on nginx configs until I had something I could manage
> simply with shell scripts and/or salt.
> 
> Note the nginx rewrite commands used in the following example, which
> includes a list of short urls into your config.  He uses github actions
> to automate things, but I'd probably use bash or salt.
> 
> https://dev.to/koddr/personal-url-shortener-on-your-domain-with-automation-through-github-actions-2h2i

Note the caveats on the solution here: "We will build the URL
shortener for only important links, that you always use
and which you won't change often." 

That does not work for this case. I do take a similar approach
(managed with salt) for BigBlueButton URLs. For example,
https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug is an NGINX redirect
configured via Salt, and I can make lots of others if I want. 

I won't have it ready for this week, but I am leaning towards setting
up a product called LiteShort: https://github.com/132ikl/liteshort/ .

I found it on the Awesome Selfhosted list:
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted/

- Paul


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