Show HN: Branch Logic and Short URLs
Let me tell you about my little hobby project idea that I plan to release open source (personal use) or SAAS(hosted version).
I want to combine traditional short url creation service with branch logic (conditional logic) and some ideas from smarturl.it
Create a short url that has the following logic: detect country + browsing device + screen resolution and other conditions.
Conditions can be added from user panel without needing to generate a different short url.
Eg. whenever someone clicks your shorten url it redirects to:
- URL 1 if country is France and iOS
- URL 2 if country is US and Android
- URL 3 if country is UK and Chrome and resolution greater than 1024x768
I am sure many other conditions will come into my mind.
I need a little feedback or critics from you. Thank you. I guess I'm struggling quite to see the use case here. For web-site providers themselves they would much rather do the conditional logic themselves because then that would apply to all visitors not just those that come via your shorturl service. I can perhaps imagine someone tweeting something like:
"I've just published a new book, get it here", where 'here' is a link, which might send the user to the correct Amazon page based on their location (eg. amazon.com for US users and amazon.co.uk for UK based users). Sounds interesting, but personally I always handle this in a tiny script that the short URL points to. I appreciate the idea of a dashboard where you configure this with some UI, but I think most people that have this problem have the skills to solve it themselves (especially since the solution to a specific case of this problem is usually very small). Who are you targeting with this?
I can see some use people in marketing-type roles that would want to configure this without asking a developer, but I'm afraid that area is kind of small. Good luck! Well, not everyone is a developer. The first target is me, then the marketing niche.