Hey everyone! 👋
Ever wanted to send a harmless prank, a meme, or a funny video to your friends, but the standard URL completely gives away the joke before they even click? I ran into this exact issue, so I decided to build a quick side project to solve it.
What is it?
I built CreepyLink, a lightweight URL masking tool. It takes any safe destination URL and generates a mysterious, "spooky" alias for it. It's perfect for harmless pranks or just confusing your Discord group.
The Development Workflow 🤖
I built this relying heavily on an AI-driven "vibe coding" workflow. By utilizing tools like Claude Code and Gemini-cli, I was able to rapidly prototype the UI and handle the routing logic much faster than a traditional manual approach. It really allowed me to focus on the core user experience and the "fun" aspect of the app rather than getting bogged down in boilerplate code.
The Technical Challenge: Open Graph Tags
The biggest hurdle for a link masker isn't the redirect itself—it's the social media preview.
If you paste a link into WhatsApp, Twitter, or Discord, the platform scrapes the <meta> tags. To make the link look genuinely "creepy" in the chat preview, I had to ensure the masked URL route serves custom Open Graph (og:title, og:image, og:description) and Twitter Card tags to the scraping bots, while still seamlessly redirecting actual human clicks to the original safe destination.
It was a fun little exercise in handling user agents and dynamic metadata!
The Final Result
Here is the live tool: [CreepyLink]
It's completely free, requires no sign-ups, and the redirects are 100% safe. Try masking a standard YouTube video and see what the preview looks like when you paste the new link into a chat!
What do you guys think of the UI? Have you built anything similar recently? Let me know in the comments! 👇
Top comments (1)
Let me know if you guys want me to open-source the routing logic!