tomi.plus

tomi.plus is a personal URL shortener with analytics. I was planning on making a URL shortener for some time, but didn’t get around to it until Porkbun ran a free Truename domain sale. tomi.plus was available, so I got it!

Stack

I wanted redirects to be server-side, so no http-equiv="refresh" meta tag or client JS. I also wanted some analytics tracking just for fun. Since I use Plausible Analytics for privacy-focused analytics, I decided to use their API to record pageviews during redirects.

Cloudflare Workers seemed pretty good for this application. I haven’t used it much before, so this project was a great excuse to learn some more. Cloudflare Workers lets you run some JS on the edge, with a 0ms cold start and a generous free tier.

On Web Crawlers

I originally logged every request to Plausible, but I was not expecting the frequency and amount of automated web crawling. There was traffic from all over the world, fuzzing for common files and directories (a lot of Wordpress stuff). I decided this was too noisy, so I switched to only tracking valid redirects.