https://github.com/stefnotch/url-catpressor

Makes your URLs 300 purr-cent better
https://github.com/stefnotch/url-catpressor

url-shortener

Last synced: 4 months ago
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Makes your URLs 300 purr-cent better

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/stefnotch/url-catpressor
• Owner: stefnotch
• License: cc0-1.0
• Created: 2022-04-20T15:25:57.000Z (about 4 years ago)
• Default Branch: main
• Last Pushed: 2023-01-24T19:29:11.000Z (over 3 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2025-04-06T15:17:13.053Z (about 1 year ago)
• Topics: url-shortener
• Language: TypeScript
• Homepage: https://stefnotch.github.io/url-catpressor/
• Size: 4.85 MB
• Stars: 3
• Watchers: 2
• Forks: 0
• Open Issues: 1
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md
  • License: LICENSE

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README

          
# URL Catpressor

[**View it in action here**](https://stefnotch.github.io/url-catpressor/)

Getting this to work involved the code being like  

![No](https://c.tenor.com/LAHdIKYb2U8AAAAd/cat-glitch.gif)

until I bonked it hard enough.

## Wait how does this work?

It takes a URL and then

1. Strips off the HTTP/HTTPS (= 1 bit, though the current implementation wastes an entire byte)

2. Brotli-compresses your URL (= n bytes)

3. Encodes some bytes by picking cat-words

    - 256 different words, so one word encodes one byte

4. Encodes the remaining bytes by picking different letters for the cat-words

    - Like for the letter `l`, there are a few [look-alikes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph) such as `1`, `I`, `|`

    - This part is very fun, because I ended up picking a fun encoding scheme...remember how binary uses 0 and 1 as its symbols? And how hexadecimal has 16 different symbols? Well, the letter-look-alikes approach has the fun property that some letters have a lot of look-alikes and others have very few. Thus, a word ends up being a cursed mixture of base 2, base 16, base 23, base 11, base 5, and more depending on the letters...

*But hey, at least I don't have to pay for a server to host a sensible backend!*

  

## Licensing Information

CC0 applies to my code. Sadly there are a few dependencies that I couldn't elegantly include with a package manager, where instead I copied the relevant source code and license.

Thus, those parts of the code are governed under a different license, as specified in their respective files.