EPIC: Link Shortening

[nelsonic]

As a person wanting to share links to items of content and shorten links to external resources, I want to have an automatic link shortening service that keeps link length to a minimum and has advanced tracking features.

Related to dwyl/app#279

Todo

• [ ] Collect the required/desired features into this EPIC #HelpWanted 🙏
• [ ] Read any examples of Open Source Link shorteners for inspiration 👀
• [ ] Build an MVP link shortener App (Tutorial) 👩‍💻
• [ ] Integrated it back into the App as we think it will be a "core" feature. 🔙

Required Features

• [ ] Store url as Fields.UrlEncrypted to maintain privacy
• [ ] Shorten the link to either a numeric (e.g: dwyl.co/123) or a base58 cid (e.g: dwyl.co/gVS)

Desirable Features

• [ ] Crawl the url and get the page.title and check for any images.
• [ ] If the url is to a GitHub page, attempt to "interpret" it using https://github.com/nelsonic/github-scraper to extract any relevant data. e.g: an issue will have a title, description, assignee, state and labels https://github.com/nelsonic/github-scraper/issues/103
• [ ] Allow people to specify their desired short url e.g: dwyl.co/welcome

• [ ] Or to pick their Twitter/GitHub username as the base of the link and then a numeric or alphanumeric sub e.g: dwyl.co/nelsonic/1 would be a directly link to my first item. This would 301 redirect to dwyl.com/items/1 (yes, in this case the actual URL is shorter than the "short" one ... but it's just for illustration)

  What else? 💭

[nelsonic]

The short domain dw.ly is available: https://domainr.com/dw.ly?q=dw.ly

The only downside is dwly is a misspelling of dwyl ... which is bad from a branding perspective. A more on-brand domain could be dwy.ly: https://domainr.com/dwy.ly?q=dwy.ly

[nelsonic]

A search on register.ly reveals the domain is not available: https://my.register.ly/cart.php?a=add&domain=register&query=dw.ly

Opened a separate issue for this: dwyl/linky#14