Outbound

Create and manage outbound links without hassle.

Use cases

• Log clicks to outbound links from your site.
• Host your own URL shortener.

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Table of Contents

• What are outbound links?
• Features
• Installation
• Usage

Features

• Bare minimum dependencies.
• Simple to setup and use.
• Analytics on your count - you have your data.
• Redirects your way - client-side or server-side.
• Use shortened URLs or complete - up to you.

Installation

Requires:

• NodeJS (latest LTS release)
• MongoDB
• A star on this repo.

npm install

Usage

npm start

Configuration required

• Rename the file config.example.json to config.json.
• Read the comments and modify the file accordingly.

Where to store the config file?

1. The root of this project (where the example file is), or
2. Anywhere you want and set the OUTBOUND_CONFIG_JSON environment variable to the path.

What are outbound links?

They are links to websites other than your own.

What's so special about them?

Well. A lot of websites seem to log every click to outbound links for the purpose of analytics.

Example, Google, Slack, Twitter, Facebook.

Try clicking a Google Search Result, link posted in a Slack/Facebook message or on Twitter.

They don't just directly open up. They first go to some middleman (like https://slack-redir.net, or https://lm.facebook.com, or https://t.co), which redirects you to the expected link.

So that's just a 301 redirect on server side?

Nope. There are two ways of redirecting.

1. Server-side: Do a HTTP 301 to the other side. The specification can be found here: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/SVR1.html.

2. Client-side: Send HTML to the browser. The browser does the rest. No JavaScript. HTML meta tags are enough. Find the specification here: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H76.html.

The client-side way is the preferred one and reliable . Many times there are devices and browsers which limit the number of redirects, making server-side redirects fail.

Why the URL shortening?

Ther are use-cases like Twitter, where you don't want long URL, or you need to provide links to be shared on by the users. There you go.