HackerURL

An URL Shortener to publish articles and easy to share

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Inspiration

There are many many URL Shorteners around the Internet. Starting from Twitter, URL shorteners became popular to fit a long url into a short tweet. However, URL shortener should be used to share with long link with others, even when offline. Most of the existing URL shorteners mix uppercase and lowercase letters and the shortened link can only be used to share online, not offline.

Currently, to share a link publicly offline with someone, the best way is to use an QR code. But QR code only works with phones with camera, but how to share link quickly between two computers? HackerURL is built with this purpose, to allow easily share shorten links without any limitation.

Besides long links, many people has the desire to share something they write with others. The content can be long and doesn't fit in a tweet. Therefore another purpose of HackerURL is let people share formatted text with others easily.

What it does

It is very similar to a traditional URL shortener. Paste the link and a short link is given so that one can share. The link consists of letters and numbers, and is case insensitive. Three confusing letters, l,o,i will not show up as the shortened link.

You can also put in a markdown formatted text. The output shortened link would not perform redirect, but will display the formatted text instead.

Also, we learned from Snapchat, so that the link can expire! You can set custom expiry time so that the link would expire after a certain amount of time.

How I built it

We use Node.js as our backend and use bootstrap to design the web page.

Challenges I ran into

We all have never developed Node.js or frontend design so we are learning everything from zero experience. Everything is a challenge but the biggest of all is to learn to use databases. We need some kind of database that allows easy retrieval of data.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is a fully functional URL shortener! We can publish markdown text (or long url) and share with others easily!

What I learned

General web design and how to integrate frontend and backend.

What's next for HackerURL

There are much more to done for our project. The most important of all is security. We don't want our project to help spammers, and we need to keep our customer's data secure. More functions would include user registration and login, and more options to customize their output page. But every new feature have to be built with security in mind.

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