Tiny App

TinyApp is a full stack web application built with Node and Express that allows users to shorten long URLs (à la bit.ly).

Node.js

EJS

Bootstrap CSS

Upon inputting a long URL in the given form, the website generates a short URL. This can be used to navigate to the long URL
The Dashboard allows users to view a list of shortened URL's under their account and quickly navigate to them, edit them or delete the URL's.
An Edit screen allows users to quickly edit a URL under said ID
The screen keeps track of the number of times a URL is visited and displays it to the user
Login and Registration capabilities allowing users to only view their URL's
Login details are stored in cookies and are not lost upon browser shutdown

Challenges

Upon filling the form and clicking "submit", the app checks if the user exists in the database. As I hadn't yet learnt SQL, I was storing the details in a JavaScript object.
If the user did not already exist, the app would create a new user. It was then hash the given password using the bcrypt module from npm.
During login, I had initially made an error. When logging in, instead of checking if the supplied password matched the one in the database, I had checked if the supplied password was equal to itself. It was quite funny once it was pointed out to me, and I have since fixed the mistake.

This was really tricky to implement. I actually spent a lot of time trying to figure something out for this, and I had to get help from a teacher.
I was trying to save the number of times a user views a page. For a long time, I was using the cookie-session module from npm to store the value in a cookie. This led to a long and complicated series of steps where the page would crash if I hadn't passed the value correctly to the page. Not to mention, there would be times when the value would start incrementing from zero instead of one
As a compromise, I ended up storing the value of timesViewed in the database (a JS object), and I would directly call the value from the database. It's a somewhat hacky solution. It wouldn't work at a large scale, but for the purposes of the exercise, it got the job done.

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