Show HN: Li.nks.monster – URL Analytics Tool

Hi everyone! This project scratches an itch I've had for awhile now (ok, maybe 5+ years). I used to love using goo.gl in the past. It was an easy way to collect analytics for links that I would share around, and was accurate in it's reporting where other services like bit.ly were not.

I couldn't find anything that would do a few things I was looking for:

- Allow me to create a short URL, and instantly have a dashboard - Give me basic geo, browser and referrer information like goo.gl did - Not require me to make an account for this information.

I understand bullet point three is a feature that could go both ways, but the point is that I wanted something where I can get up and running with a shareable link as quickly as possible.

As for the tech stack, I tried to use some technologies that I haven't used before, and some that I have.

- It's written in Go, I'm very familiar with the language and have used it at scale. - Hosted on AWS Beanstalk - again I'm familiar with hosting software here, and Beanstalk has the opportunity to use arm64 machines which I was eager to test out, so it was just a matter of me compiling a linux/arm64 compatible binary to push out. I'm on the smallest instance available at a cost of ~$3.60/mo. - Uses dynamodb for meta data - I've used Mongo in the past, but I wanted to use something I didn't need to manage, and Aurora was cost prohibitive for a project that may never see the light of day. - Uses Timestream for analytical data - Again, I didn't want to use MySQL to track this data, I wanted to find something scaleable and I knew timeseries databases were all the rage. I saw that this is a pay-as-you go solution and a zero-maintenance service.

Hopefully someone else that misses the simplicity of goo.gl will find this useful!