Check out the final version created by Kent https://github.com/kentcdodds/netlify-shortener
Just a test to see if I could use netlify's redirect as an url shortener.
Got the inspiration from watching this video from Kent C. Dodds
I started by just adding the _redirects file to check if that worked. Then I wanted to build something that I could edit outside of git, so I added netlify-cms and a small build script to generate the _redirects file for me. That worked out okay, but in the end, it was not more comfortable than editing the file in git. All of that work is still on the netlify-cms branch if someone later wants to look at it.