Today is day 3 Blogvent, where I blog every day in December!

I love combining small tools and making utilities that make my life a bit easier. There are two tools (one I made and one I use) that I have really been loving:

• My personal URL shortener cass.run
• The bookmark manager Raindrop

I combined these two to make something pretty handy, and I’m gonna tell you about it!

The URL shortener

My URL shortener is on GitHub, and it is way smaller than you’d think. You can find it at cass.run/shortener.

If you want to build one for yourself, here’s how:

• Make a GitHub repository with a _redirects file in it (you can see how mine’s structured in the link above, or some more details in the snippet below)
• Deploy that repo to Netlify
• Add a custom domain to the site you just deployed to Netlify

Your _redirects file should have a fallback URL (mine is my personal website), and then everything above it should be structured as the route that you want, and then the link to that route, like so:

/gh            https://github.com/cassidoo

#fallback
/*             https://cassidoo.co

So in this example, whateverdomain.foo/gh would point to my GitHub profile, and whateverdomain.foo/example would point to my website.

You can have as many of these URLs as you want (I have about 50 in my current shortener), and to add a new one you just make a new line with the route and URL!

There’s also an npm package that you can use to quickly add short URLs via your CLI, if you want to use that (I really like it, myself).

The bookmarking tool

I’ve talked about Raindrop before in my productivity app roundups, and I stand by it. It’s an awesome tool. It works as a browser extension, as a mobile app, and as a desktop app on all the platforms, and lets you very easily and quickly tag and categorize your bookmarks.

One thing in particular that I like, and want to talk about here, is the fact that you can use it to make public bookmark collections! I’ve seen folks use that to make “job boards” of listings they find, or collections of videos across platforms. It’s great because you get a URL that you can share with friends easily, and it’ll stay updated as you add/remove/update your bookmarks in that collection.

All powers combined??

You see where I’m going with this, eh?

My favorite combo of these tools is one that has made me some money, but more than anything it has saved me time when people ask me about it: I made a public collection of my referral links to various platforms and services, and pointed my URL shortener to it!

cass.run/ref

When you head to this very easy-to-remember URL, you can see the discounts and offerings you get from things I refer you to, from SaaS services to mattresses (literally, I bought a mattress recently and they have some pretty good deals for referrals, who knew).

Before I had this combo of tools, I would always forget if I had a referral link to a given service. Usually the perks aren’t huge, sure, but little things do add up over time if you remember. Now, if someone asks me for a particular site or service, I can keep those links all in one place, and access it in a really quick way. And we all benefit! It has saved my friends money, and it’s made me money/credits/etc. Wins all around!

But wait, there’s more!

Okay there’s not that much more. But again, I love this concept of using tools for something super specific, and making something useful. I’ve combined CodePen and Obsidian to make quick scripts, I’ve made tiny browser extensions that do one thing really well… those small utilities really make huge gains in productivity (and fun, in a lot of cases), particularly when they’re just for you!