Knot

✨ The Open Source URL Shortner ✨

A very simple URL shortener made by using Google Form & Spreadsheet as a backend to store and get URL and data. Knot never logs the number of times a URL gets a request or anything. It simply shorts the long URL and stores data in a spreadsheet using google form. It is made just for experimental and educational purposes.

How it works?

In the main landing pagae, there are two inputs. 1st Alias and 2nd Long URL. Here i am using google form to store the recored in google spreadsheet when a new request is made on index.html page. As this is a custom HTML form ( if you don't know how to setup custom html form watch this tutorial video ). In this form when a user enter/change alice it get stored in localstorage of browser using. Now once the form is submitted successfully it redirects users to shorted.html page. Here when a user arrives it display the shorted url ( simply by adding alias value at the end of the url).

var sourceUrl = "https://cttricks.github.com/knot/load.html?sl=" + localStorage.getItem("alias");

//Example : https://cttricks.github.com/knot/load.html?sl=tanish

Now when a user visit the shorted url i.e load.html page, with the sl value. It make a GET request on google spreadsheet with SQL query in the request url. Query : SELECT B WHERE C ='" + page.searchParams.get("sl") + "'"

const baseID = "Spreadsheet_ID";
const baseName = "Sheet1";
const page = new URL(window.location.href);

var url = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/"+baseID+"/gviz/tq?tqx=out:json&sheet="+baseName+"&tq=" + encodeURIComponent("SELECT B WHERE C ='" + page.searchParams.get("sl") + "'");

On response it parse the response text, and loads the long url in the same tab.

Create your own

Download the files of this repo and upload it to the hosting server. And follow these simple steps.

• Create a new google form
• Create two fileds, 1st Alias and 2nd Long URL
• Now get the entry.codes of these two fileds. ( you can easily get it by creating a prefilled link )
• On response section you'll get an option to add response sheet. Click on that, it'll open a spreadhseet for you. Here on the top right corner click on share and set permission to anyone with link can view.
• Open index.html and upadted the form action url and entry.code with yours
• Open shorted.html and upadted the default shortened link https://cttricks.github.io/knot/load.html?sl= with your domain and path to this file.
• Open load.html and update the baseID and baseName (baseName = sheetname)

All done, Now test your own Knot version of URL shortner.

🎯 Why i'm building this ?

Long ago i made a tutorial on how to store custom from data to google spreadsheet using google form. And as we all know, Google Spreadsheet is a very powerful tool and there is an option to query and get data using export method with SQL querys. So i mixed this two thing togather and made this url shortner ( Just as an experiment ) using Google Forms and Spreadsheet. It is not a complete solution. But yeah! Anyone can use this in their small/big projects at their own risk. 😄

⚠️ Use my version of knot only for testing.

📌 Important Links

• Knot Demo
• Demo + Tutorial Video (NA)

Enjoy...!!