Add an internal URL shortener for the company
I find it a bit annoying that I have to bookmark all the significant links that we use. Instead, it would be nice if we could type go/teamcall
in the browser and have it go to the team call agenda. Google does this within their corporate networks via an internal URL shortener that makes it more convenient to share URLs:
From https://github.com/kellegous/go:
The first time I encountered "go" links was at Google. Anyone on the corporate network could register a URL shortcut and it would redirect the user to the appropriate page. So for instance, if you wanted to find out more about BigTable, you simply directed your browser at http://go/bigtable and you would be redirected to something about the BigTable data storage system. I was later told that the first go service at Google was written by Benjamin Staffin to end the never-ending stream of requests for internal CNAME entries. He described it as AOL keywords for the corporate network. These days if you go to any reasonably sized company, you are likely to find a similar system. Etsy made one after seeing that Twitter had one ... it's a contagious and useful little tool. So contagious, in fact, that many former Googlers that I know have built or contributed to a similar system post-Google. I am no different, this is my "go" link service.
A number of them exist:
- https://github.com/maccman/go
- https://github.com/kellegous/go
- https://github.com/cydrobolt/polr
- https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS
I've used the first one at another company. It's simple and seems to work.
I checked out https://github.com/kellegous/go just now. It's a little less intuitive to use and doesn't give you an index of all the possibility links, but it looks maintained.
In either case, it would be nice if we:
- Started something like
go.gitlap.com
and put it behind an OAuth2 proxy for GitLab.com accounts. - Encouraged people to add links and share them with this name.
Thoughts?