Articles about URL shortening, link management, analytics, security, and best practices — written by the team behind hrva.cc.
Long URLs are ugly, hard to share, and easy to mistype. A URL shortener solves these problems — but modern tools go far beyond just shrinking links.
Knowing how many people clicked your link is just the beginning. Here's what link analytics can tell you — and why it matters for your marketing.
Set it and forget it — expiration dates and visit limits give you full control over your links, even after you've shared them.
URL shorteners are everywhere — but not all short links are created equal. Follow these best practices to keep your links trustworthy, trackable, and effective.
How Google Safe Browsing keeps your short links safe — and why every URL shortener should check destinations before sharing them.
A deep dive into the architecture behind hrva.cc — how we keep links fast, safe, and always available through Redis caching, JWT auth, Safe Browsing, and zero-downtime migrations.
How we use Liquibase, backward-compatible schema changes, and careful deploy ordering to evolve our PostgreSQL schema without downtime.
How we use Spring's TaskExecutor to fire-and-forget visit tracking, email sending, and cache warmup — keeping the redirect path under 5ms.
A deep dive into our Redis caching architecture — how we keep 99% of redirects cache-hot, validate stale data, and survive Redis outages.
How we integrate Google Safe Browsing v4 to check every URL at creation time and recheck all active URLs daily — with auto-deactivation and email notifications.
How we used Spring AOP to auto-log every admin action — and why we had to exclude read-only endpoints to avoid noise.
How we migrated from Angular 14 to Next.js 16 while keeping the live app running — and the lessons we learned about incremental rewrites.
The design decisions behind hrva.cc's interface — why we removed the advanced options toggle, how we upsell without being pushy, and what we learned from user behavior.
Why we made hrva.cc open source, what the community taught us, and the surprising number of people who want to self-host their link infrastructure.