goto

A link shortener/redirect tool for my personal productivity, using Netlify functions.

Why?

In any given day, I might visit the same URL 15 times. For example, the artsy/reaction repo is one I spend a lot of time in.

A minor annoyance is that when I type reaction into my browser search bar, it takes me a little bit of time to figure out which of my recent URLs or bookmarks are the one I actually want. Like this:

goto is a link shortener (kind of) that I can set as a custom search engine in Chrome. When I want to visit the reaction repo on GitHub, I now type goto gh reaction and hit enter, like this:

It's kind of like I'm building a CLI in my browser search bar. Chrome recognizes goto as my custom search engine, and sends the query text to my Netlify function. My Netlify function reads the text and if it understands what I'm requesting, redirects me to a specific URL. If it doesn't understand, it sends me to Google.

Why didn't you just _?

There are probably a million other ways to solve this problem, but this is the one that fit best with my habits. It was also a fun opportunity to play with Netlify functions, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯