goto

Service that lets you create short mapping for easy sharing a la Google's internal http://go/somewhere.

What this is:

This main intent is to share clear, readable, easy to remember URL mappings and reduce cognitive load.

(on user's head): Where was our interns policy? Is it on the wiki? If on wiki.. where?

(on user's head): I don't exactly know, but I remember I can get there by http://go/interns, Great!

What this is NOT:

This is not a link shortener. While they both share similar characteristics, their intent is different. The link shortener main objective is to create a short URL out of a long one generally through ID auto-generation. See 'What this is' for it's intention

Example use-cases:

You can announce to your organization that they can check the company's testing policy at http://go/tests (or once the company gets used to it you can announce it as go/tests. Users can easily remember that URL and at the same time identify it's intention.

go/roadmap
go/interns
go/pci
go/policy
go/nsa -- creepy --

Usage

Ideally when using it in production, you would like to map the the internal DNS service of go to this service and make it listen (or proxy it) on port 80.

In development, you might want to create an entry in your hosts file for 127.0.0.1 go.

Running the service

The server can be run just by executing it:

  $ ./goto

For maximizing succinctness it runs on port 80 by default but can be changed at startup with the -p param.

  $ goto -p 8080 # starts the service in port 8080

Reserved endpoints

Implying that you have the mapping on your DNS or hosts as go => [servers IP address]:

http://go/mappings - Will give you a list of the current existing mappings.

http://go/mappings/{entry} - Will give you the url that maps the given entry if exists or 404 Not Found.

Design Decisions

One of the main goals is to leave it as simple and light as possible to fulfills its intent. Since we're not supporting retrograde browsers, HTML5 standard APIs are to be used and not any additional library should be included.

bootstrap.min.css is only included to aid on somewhat decent UI.

It is also a tour to HTML5 adoption.

Roadmap

The goal of this project is to stay as simple and hackable as possible. Features need to be very, very justified.

What it will NOT

On the few pages that it entails, it will never support crippled irresponsible browsers (yeah, yeah... IE).
Filter unwanted (possible malignus) URLs. Since the final destination gets obscured by the mapped URL, it expects the users to be responsible to where they redirect.

What it WILL

Very simple (csv/json?) datastore

MAYBE

Simple statistics (maybe achiebable by integrating google analytics - will it work on an only internal network?)
Authenticated creation of mappings? - Since we will not be filtering unwanted URL, at least we might want to know who registered them (will this prevent abuse?).
- Possible shortcommings: Support LDAP? Support DB Auth? What DB? - We can see it starts to get spooky. Maybe no support at all and count on mature responsible users.

Customizing UI

The templates for the few existing pages live under web/tmpl. You can modify them as needed.

License

MIT

fcarriedo / goto