Menehune URL Shortener

The about page. It is the main landing page and information hub.
The shortener page where the main functionality occurs.
The profile information page is where you can change your account password and provide additional information about yourself.
The account creation page. An account is required to use URL shortening services.
The login page. This is where you will sign into your account after creating it.

Inspiration

External URL shorteners are blocked by the states network due to people using the service to send malicious links. Menehune URL Shortener was created to help increase trust and transparency when using a URL shortener.

What it does...

Menehune is a URL shortening service with a focus on security and transparency. We offer transparency through data analytics and we offer security through malware detection and user accountability.

How we built it

This web application was built using HTML, CSS, & JavaScript and hosted with Azure. The front-end used Pug as our templating language and Bootstrap for our styling. We used NodeJS and Express to create our back-end and used MongoDB with Mongoose for our storage.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges is adding value that other URL shorteners do not offer. Our web application provides security by checking URLs against bad links and malware.

What's next for Menehune

Full Chain of trust for shortened domains
- What redirects happened before the ip was resolved to its origin
Additional admin functionality
- Allow the Admin to edit to list of banned URLs
- Allow the admin to add to the ip address/domain block list
- Allow the admin to enforce https only
- Automatically blocking users after X number of malicious attempts