Show HN: Branch Logic and Short URLs

3 points by adrian_pop 10 years ago | 3 comments

Let me tell you about my little hobby project idea that I plan to release open source (personal use) or SAAS(hosted version).

I want to combine traditional short url creation service with branch logic (conditional logic) and some ideas from smarturl.it

Create a short url that has the following logic: detect country + browsing device + screen resolution and other conditions.

Conditions can be added from user panel without needing to generate a different short url.

Eg. whenever someone clicks your shorten url it redirects to:

- URL 1 if country is France and iOS

- URL 2 if country is US and Android

- URL 3 if country is UK and Chrome and resolution greater than 1024x768

I am sure many other conditions will come into my mind.

I need a little feedback or critics from you. Thank you.

allanderek 10 years ago |

I guess I'm struggling quite to see the use case here. For web-site providers themselves they would much rather do the conditional logic themselves because then that would apply to all visitors not just those that come via your shorturl service.

I can perhaps imagine someone tweeting something like: "I've just published a new book, get it here", where 'here' is a link, which might send the user to the correct Amazon page based on their location (eg. amazon.com for US users and amazon.co.uk for UK based users).

timvdalen 10 years ago |

Sounds interesting, but personally I always handle this in a tiny script that the short URL points to.

I appreciate the idea of a dashboard where you configure this with some UI, but I think most people that have this problem have the skills to solve it themselves (especially since the solution to a specific case of this problem is usually very small).

Who are you targeting with this? I can see some use people in marketing-type roles that would want to configure this without asking a developer, but I'm afraid that area is kind of small.

Good luck!

adrian_pop 10 years ago | |

Well, not everyone is a developer.

The first target is me, then the marketing niche.