Redirecting

While working on my #API, I figured out a way to set up a system of dynamic redirects with alias matching. This means I can define multiple links that all redirect to a specific URL, for example /instagram, /ig and /insta all redirect to my instagram profile. The advantage of this is that I don’t have to remember a specific term, any other synonym I defined will work too.

This was made possible by setting up a second domain (muensterer.link), that forwards requests to the /redirect route of my #API. I also modified the 404 page on my homepage to automatically attempt a redirect if the page does not exist.

It even passes on the rest of the URL, so instead of going https://github.com/dnnsmnstrr/dotfiles I can just type muensterer.link/gh/dotfiles. This “autoexpansion” of URL components has proven to be very useful.

There are different ways to access these redirects:

• next.muensterer.xyz/api/redirect - the direct api url
• http://api.muensterer.xyz/redirect - the aliased url
• https://muensterer.xyz/redirect
  • this is possible through a repository which hosts a simple HTML file via pages and redirects to muensterer.link
• muensterer.link
  • forwards to the api url
• 404 on muensterer.xyz
  • If a page is not found, there is an automatic redirect attempt with a noReturn parameter to avoid infinite loops back to the 404 page

Ideas

• check for fallbacks in projects and notes (Github API)

Links

• Edit redirects