About

Hi, my name is Nandu Dharmapalan and I am a full stack software developer. The idea for this website came from the problem of long urls on my blog eating up space in the youtube description. I searched for url shorteners and found some free plans on bitly.com, tinyurl.com etc. It made me curious about how it works and if I could implement it myself, cutting out the middleman. I found that if I had a back end application running then it could listen for the shorter version of the url and sent back 301, 307 or 308 redirection status codes as http response and achieve redirection using a shorter url. The same could be achieved by adding 301, 307 etc redirects to server configuration files like .htaccess or nginx.conf.

Since my blog is running on AWS amplify as a static website, there is no backend application running. AWS Amplify has the option to add "Rewrites and redirects" built in but it is on an html form rather than a file like .htaccess that can be easily stored and transferred. Even though that is the more efficient way to do it, I decided not to use it. as in case I change to a different hosting provider then I have to rewrite it all again. Then I came across meta refresh html tags as a way to achieve redirection. This redirection is done by the browser when it goes through the html file and comes across the html code to redirect compared to going through the response header in the first method. Anyway this way I can store the redirecting code as html files which means it is easier to transfer the redirecting setup. This method takes more time than the first method but it fits the use case in terms of easier transfer of redirection setup and to not be reliant on third party solutions(Not because there is something wrong with it but because of wanting to have less moving parts).

This website attempts to generate the html file with meta refresh tags added using the url supplied. The generated code/file can be previewed and/or downloaded. Hopefully it makes it easier to create such files.

Note: Please make sure to verify the accuracy of the generated html file as there is always the possibility of bugs and this website makes no guarantee as to the accuracy of the generated html code or file.