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/