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 💁♂️
That's why I created my own freaking url shortener with pure JavaScript + HTML + CSS ❤
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 🚀 You don't even need to own a site that gets about 17 million unique visitors per month 😏
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 👆
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 💙. If any of my projects helped you please consider making a donation.
EDIT 0: Minimal URL can be hosted on any website hosting services like GitHub/GitLab pages, Firebase/Heroku hosting, etc. Hosting on GitHub pages was just for proof of concept.
If you followed this post and used GitHub pages for hosting, the site will be hosted on your_github_username.github.io/mnmlurl/src I forgot the /src, sorry.
Alternatively you can npm build the project and host the contents from output folder on any other hosting services like Firebase/Heroku etc.
EDIT 1: If you want to take development further, consider contributing on GitHub.
EDIT 2: Minimal URL is an experimental project. Don't shorten sensitive contents/URLs with it.
Thanks a lot, I confirm it works! ;)
Don't worry this let me understand better how github pages works.
Do you think this could have some basic analytics in the future (like those that tinyurl has?). It would be amazing to know how much people click on the link ;)
Besides, is it possible to shorten urls with the shell using this app?
I don't know how to do it but I'm thinking in something like creating an npm package that one can then install globally on the system, so then do a command like:
Hi, I might be missing something but how does the shortener work after instalaltion and deployment? Because I only see my shortener attached to my URL as an hash. I though the purpose was to have something like nl.sn redirect to my site and instead I get the whole URL, like www.dummysite.com/mnml/src/#sn Am I misunderstanding the concept? Thanks
Concept is to map one custom (and preferably a short domain like goo.gl, bit.do etc) URL say dummysite.com#abc to this_is_a_very_very_long_and_ugly_URL.com/still_long/blah_blah_blah.
That's pretty much all about a URL shorter.
You can make your URL shortener like dummysite.com#abc after moving contents from src to root of your hosting site to remove mnmlurl/src extension from your domain. 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.
Shortened URL is a branded one and users can easily get what this URL is for. Sites like Twitter have a character limit on posts that wont allow users to post long URLs. So URLs must be short and concise.
There are so many things I love about this post! To name a few, it's:
Easy to read
Get's to the code right away
Gives a simple story/explanation
Looks beautiful
And it's free?!
I just made this and it took maybe 3 minutes at max. I'm definitely going to play with the code and see what cool things can be done. Thank you for sharing this!
I'm not good with making videos nor I haven't done or even thought about it in the first place. Source is available on GitHub, please go through it. For queries, contact me via twitter or dev.to messages. I wouldn't mind you making a video about this with credits.
Fixed relative path issues. Don't forget to force refresh [Ctrl + Shift + R] the page to update changes. ⭐ Star the project on GitHub show some ❤ love!
I don't understand, I tried to go to the demo at mnmlurl.ml/ and pasted a long URL, but it gives me for example mnmlurl.ml/#4hJhX which does not redirect me anywhere...
Sorry, I'm not maintaining this project anymore. But you can make use of any other CMS services which support CRUD operations through APIs and it should work.
mnmlurl
⭐ Star the project on GitHub show some ❤ love!