URL Shortener

A long URL is a liability in many situations. Social media platforms truncate long links in previews, making them unclickable. Email clients wrap long URLs across multiple lines, breaking them. Chat messages with long links look cluttered and untrustworthy. Printed materials with long URLs are impossible to type by hand. In all of these cases, a short link solves the problem instantly — it is readable, copyable, and works wherever it is placed. EaseBowl's URL Shortener creates short links on easebowl.com itself. When someone clicks a short link, the server looks up the original URL in the database and redirects them there in milliseconds. The redirect is permanent and does not expire — links you create today will keep working indefinitely. The custom alias feature is what sets this tool apart from generic shorteners. Instead of getting a random seven-character code like easebowl.com/xK7mP2q, you can choose a memorable name like easebowl.com/my-portfolio or easebowl.com/summer-sale. Custom aliases must be between 3 and 20 characters and can contain letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores. The tool checks whether your chosen alias is already taken before creating the link, and gives you an instant error message if it is so you can try a different name. The browser history panel shows the last ten links you created in this browser, with the short URL, the original destination, and how long ago each was created. You can copy any of them with one click or delete individual entries. The history is stored only in your browser's local storage — it is never transmitted to any server and you can clear it at any time. This means the history is private to your device, and if you clear your browser data it will be gone. The QR code button generates a visual grid representation of your short link that you can screenshot and include in presentations, printed flyers, or social media posts. Scanning it with a phone camera will direct the user to your short link. This is useful for bridging the gap between printed and digital content — a flyer at an event can have a QR code that links to a registration page, a ticket purchase, or a product page. Short links created through this tool store a click counter in the database that increments each time the link is visited. This passive analytics capability means that with direct database access you can see how many times a link has been clicked, which is useful for measuring the reach of a campaign or a shared resource. The tool uses Firebase Firestore as its database, which provides globally distributed, low-latency storage for the short link records. When you click Shorten, the link is written to Firestore and is immediately live — there is no processing queue or delay. The redirect at the /{shortId} route on the server reads from the same database and forwards visitors to the original URL in a single server-side redirect, which means the original URL is not exposed in the browser before the redirect happens.