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Version 1.x of Branded Short Links handled redirects and optionally fired analytics through a Google Tag Manager container — server-side, from the worker itself. That worked, but it meant routing all tracking through GTM and configuring tags, triggers, and variables inside Google's interface.

Version 2.0.0 replaces the GTM integration with direct server-side trackers. Instead of funneling everything through a single GTM container, each tracker fires independently from the worker — GA4, Facebook, PostHog, ntfy, Reverse Proxy for ntfy, or plain-text webhooks — with no middleman.

Setting up a new short link means adding an entry to your configuration with the shortcode, redirect status code, and destination URL. For one or two links, that's fine. For a batch of campaign links or a team that doesn't want to touch config files, it's friction.

The link generator is a browser-based tool that lets you build short link configurations visually, then copy the result into your project.

URL shorteners are everywhere, and most of them work just fine for casual use. But when we needed short links on our own domain with full control over redirect behavior, the existing options didn't quite fit.

We wanted yourdomain.com/github — not a generic shortener domain. We wanted to choose between 301 and 302 redirects. And we wanted to own the configuration and deployment rather than relying on a managed shortener service.

Branded Short Links runs on Cloudflare Workers — it still depends on Cloudflare as infrastructure, but the shortener logic, configuration, and domain are entirely yours.