Rick Rolling Tiny URL

I will keep this one short. But hopefully sweet :)

rickrolling

“Rickrolling is when you troll someone on the internet by linking to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It is, by far, the most popular example of bait-and-switch linking.”

source

If you know what rickrolling is, that means that one day you were the subject of this joke that is starting to disappear as people memorize more and more the link of the video.

But what if there was a way you could mask that?

Tiny URL

TinyURL is a website that allows you to easily shorten an URL and in certain ways, mask it. Whenever you click on a TinyURL link, you have no idea where you are going end up.

This could be taken a step further.

What if you could mask the URL you are sending and, why not, give it a percentage to go to a completely different website?

that's what I created

Rlld

Rlld (short for Rolled) is a website that allows you to shorten your URL and give it a percentage to instead of directing you to the correct website, it redirects you to a Rick Roll video.

Is it usefull?

No

Is it fun?

Probably annoying and not going to be used in the real world

But it allowed me to learn more things about base62 conversion. As I believed it was a better solution to simply hash the URL and have a very long resulting URL. In this case, we have super short URL which maps to the database index of the original URL.

These are some screens from the web application itself ->

How to implement this? Here is an example I made in Go to quickly encode and decode the base62 string to and from base10:

func base10ToBase62(id int) string {
  m := "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789"
	var shortURL []string
  for id > 0 {
    shortURL = append(shortURL, string(m[id%62]))
    id /= 62
  }
  return strings.Join(shortURL, "")
}

func base62ToBase10(shortID string) int {
  id := 0
  for i := len(shortID) - 1; i >= 0; i-- {
    val_i := int(shortID[i])
    if val_i >= int('a') && val_i <= int('z') {
      id = id*62 + val_i - int('a')
    } else if val_i >= int('A') && val_i <= int('Z') {
      id = id*62 + val_i - int('Z') + 26
    } else {
      id = id*62 + val_i - int('0') + 52
    }
  }
  return id
}

Website

The frontend was developed using React and Chakra-UI for all the components that you see around :D

Here is a full view of the website in a gif format:

Creating a new rlld	Accessing the link

So far you cannot see the website as it’s still not fully deployed, but you can check this repository that allows you to run it locally with docker with a simple command.

I will update this post whenever the website is live! Which can mean it might take a long time