With a need to include shortened URLs on my resume as an alternative to the full URL that has the potential to fill several lines worth of premium real estate on a resume, I wanted to use an alternative to common services such as Bitly and TinyURL to eliminate the fear of having tight limitations on the number of short URLs I can have or with advertisements possibly being added by these companies when clicking the short URL as part of their free service plan. This project is an application hosted on my Azure cloud platform that helps me generate these shortened URLs.
I discovered a project that filled this need perfectly. With it, you receive a number of resources deployed on your cloud platform to accomplish this task, including a set of container apps to generate the links and storage accounts to hold the metadata. This project was great as it gave me a reason to practice using some tools that are somewhat new to me. For one, it got me to use Docker, which is something I’ve been wanting to do a deeper dive with. This was needed for deploying the project to my Azure site. Pairing with this, I also installed and used the Azure Developer CLI, running commands to perform the steps to deploy the project.
The cool thing about this tool is that you can incorporate your own custom domain name for your short URLs. I had some fun with this as it was a challenge to keep the domain name as short as possible, so including the top-level domain as part of the naming convention was a creative challenge. Inspirations are short URL domain names such as youtu.be and goo.gl. For mine, I created myurlz.one (my URL zone). Top-level domain '.zone' was nice but was too expensive for my budget but I noticed '.one' was available at a lower cost, had WHOIS privacy, in addition to a few other features I wanted that alternative TLDs didn't offer. With this, I added 'z' at the end of the domain name so 'zone' was written out as 'z.one'. Slickkkkkkkkkkk.
An example below is the shortened URL version which uses my own custom domain and has a clean vanity (the back half of the URL to the right of the forward slash) that helps describe the link versus a service such as Bitly that randomly generates numbers and letters. For this example, it takes you to my Azure Fundamentals certification (AKA, the AZ-900).
A previous project got me familiar with building my own GitHub profile and setting it up, but this project introduced me on the why and how to fork a repository, so it's another new subject to learn. Finally, this one got me to explore container apps, what each one does that deployed with this project, and how to use them. The documentation for the project helped with the basics, but then I used it as a jumping off point to explore further on my own in terms of their primary purposes in addition to checking out the resources in the Azure portal and seeing how they are constructed and any new insights I can discover. In the end, this project pairs wonderfully with the cloud resume challenge project plus I can use this service whenever I need to send someone a short link.
Top learning topics for this project:
- Docker
- Azure Developer CLI
- Custom domain name
- Container apps
- GitHub fork
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