25 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
25 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
Lately, I've been interested in improving my URL shortener hosted at [https://trkt.in](https://trkt.in). So I did!
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I present.. **Chela!**
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I named Chela off of the small claw on crabs because it's like the little claw compared to the big one. Ok, I admit the name is vague but I think it's cute.
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I built Chela in Rust using Axum as a server framework. It runs off of a Postgres database. It's very simple by design and also very fast. Using `curl`, I get a response in around a millisecond typically.
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In my previous iteration of this project, I rather lazily generated IDs by hashing the URLs and then taking the first four or so letters. It was ugly and at increasing risk of collision.
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In this new iteration, I'm using [Sqids](https://sqids.org/) to generate IDs. It's better, faster (I think), and it looks prettier.
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For example,
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- [https://trkt.in/2614aab104d](https://trkt.in/2614aab104d)
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- [https://trkt.in/WX](https://trkt.in/WX)
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These both link to the same website (my previous blog post), but one of them is a whole lot easier to remember.
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Also, this new version supports the `+` feature from bit.ly, where if you put a plus sign at the end of a URL it will show you what it links to. Try it!
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I made the Docker image for Chela as small as I could without going off the deep end. The Chela binary is around 5Mb, and the full Docker image is just about 14Mb not including the Postgres dependency.
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If you're interested, feel free to check it out here: [https://trkt.in/oz](https://trkt.in/oz).
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