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Show HN: Redirect clicks using a formula (nimblelinks.com)

2 points by matt413 ↗ HN
Part of my day job requires me to review a report monthly. The URL for July's report looks something like this:

fancyreport.com?from=2022-07-01&to=2022-07-31

Typing this URL manually every month was just enough pain for me to put up a simple script on somedomainiown.com/magic that redirected me to the report for the current month by automatically filling in the "from" and "to" values in the URL. This way, I could bookmark one link and always open the latest report with one click.

At some point, I figured I should put this behind a UI so that I could share it with my colleagues and maybe HN too. A couple of weeks of hacking, and here we are with an MVP the little imposter inside me finally accepted to post online.

P.S. the "formule" implementation gets the job done for me, but is pretty rudimentary. Would love to know if you have a specific use case that'd benefit from other parameters or a more advanced formula system.

2 comments

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merkul204
can you give examples on some use cases? seems like a cool tool, I come from ecom and was thinking of how this could solve a problem for me, but couldn't think of anything
matt413
Thanks for checking it out. I may be way out of my depth here, but these are some examples I could think of:

I have two separate propmotions running in US and CA. I could create a link with this formula "https://ecom.com/promotions/{country}" and use the generated shortlink in my social posts. Users who click on the link will be automatically redirected to the correct promotion based on their IP address.

I have 50 products, and want to run a lucky "product" campaign. I create a link with this formula "https://ecom.com/products/{randomNumber}" and post it up on social media. Users who click on my link will randomly land on one of my products (I realise this requires a bit of adjustment I should make to the tool to make random numbers customisable).

I'm running a campaign that should send users to different pages each day (or month). I could write "https://ecom.com/promotions/daily-{day}" or "https://ecom.com/promotions/monthly-{month}" so that users who click on my short link are always redirected to the correct page without needing me to update my link every day / month.

I recognise I'm searching for problems to fit the solution here. Do any of these make any sense?