Photo by Ozark Drones on Unsplash
I love using URL shorteners to easily share links without hitting character limits, but they loose their meaning. Services like bit.ly will save my links for me so that I can find them, but I would rather them to be easy to remember. https://bit.ly/2ruLwQz does not roll of the tongue so well.
301 🤸♀️
I recently discovered a really cool feature of netlify that I have always looked past, _redirects. It is so simple cool and powerful, every netlify site should do this!
But how 🤷♀️
simply add a _redirects file to the root of your your published site with the following format. The trick I found with my gatsby site was that it needed to be in my static directory /static/_redirects, not root. Next you just put space separated links on separate lines. #'s can be used for comments.
# netlify redirects
# from_url to_url
# Short-Blog
/blog/scli /blog/simple-click/
/blog/cmdt /blog/cmd-exe-tips/
.
.
.
# splats
/b* /blog/:splat
/n* /notes/:splat
# External
/twitter https://twitter.com/_WaylonWalker
/github https://github.com/WaylonWalker
/devto https://dev.to/waylonwalker/
🙌 Share those short links
Now with shorter links we have more space for our content without needing to use a service like bit.ly that makes our links unreadable.
This page was originally posted on my personal blog https://waylonwalker.com/b/purl/
Top comments (1)
Hey Waylon - thanks for the helpful post! I'm going to set up something similar for myself. I'm curious - what's a splat?
Annnnnd PS - I've also got a background in Mechanical Engineering! ✊