Tips and Tricks

Various tips and tricks to help you in your journey with go/links extension

How to use go/links

Once you download the go/links extension, you can start using go/links right away. Type help/learn in your address bar and it will bring you to this website.

If instead you go to search results page, make sure that the suggestion that you press enter on, has the world icon next to it. This icon with change to the correct website after you have used the route.

The icon and suggestions are updated after you have used the route

What go/links can I use?

When you install the extension for the first time, we add some default go/links so that you can easily get started. You can pick more routers from our quickstart templates or add your own routers.

Start by clicking on the go/links extension icon

If you don't see the extension icon, click on the plugin icon to see all the extensions

It will take you to the go/links dashboard. Here you can easily add new routers.

Each router starts with a unique router and can contain unlimited routes

What are routers and routes?

A router can be easily made from a google spreadsheet. You can use this template to get started. Here is a sample router

In this router, there are 7 routes that will be available to us after we have added them to our go/links dashboard. Before you can add a router to go/links, you need to make sure of following:

• All the routes are added in the sheet name GoLinks

• Spreadsheet is shared with [e-mail] as view permissions

• Column A will contain the route shortcut and Column B will contain the complete URL

These are your routes that you can add to your go/links router. We have just added them with router help.

So the result is that you can use help/faq to come to this page and help/start to go to the template.

How should a team use go/links?

We suggest using a shared spreadsheet and a common router id. For example our team uses a shared spreadsheet for all the routes and our router is cake. This has following benefits.

• It allows everyone in the team to add or edit routes

• It gives the ability to rollback if there were some mistakes made in the routes

• It also keeps everyone accountable to edits that are made

go/ is a popular router id among teams but you can also use your own custom router id. You want it to be easy to remember and quick to type. Once you have decided on the router, everyone in the team needs to use that router id and add the router to their go/links dashboard. Let's assume that you chose ok/ as the default router for your team.

Now everyone in the team can start using the same routes for various tasks. You will start noticing conversations like this:

• Hey team, your benefits can now be accessed at ok/benefits

• This presentations is available at ok/gameplan for further review

• Go to ok/jira to take a look at current sprint

• Vote on your meal picks for our end of the year party at ok/party

With go/links web has just become easier to navigate.

How to understand the usage of go/links?

We allow you to track your or team's usage of go/links with the help of Google Analytics. All you need is a GA id to which we should send the events. You can add it to a router field as you add it through go/links dashboard.

On your Google Analytics dashboard you can see the usage in events panel

Google Analytics dashboard where you can see the events. This one is for go/pr redirects.

We are committed to your privacy. To this extent we have taken following measures:

• If you want to track usage, you have to add a GA id, while adding a router. This allows it to be user opt in where users can choose to add a router and not add the GA id.

• Even after you have added the router with GA id, we generate a random id for you that is sent to the Google Analytics. It does not have any personally identifiable data attached to it. Moreover, you can reset it by uninstalling the extension and re-installing it.

• When you allow your usage for a router to be tracked, all the events are sent to the Google Analytics account associated with the GA id. So if you are using your team's GA id, only your team has access to the analytics usage.

We suggest that teams utilize the analytics data to understand how the routes are being used and if it's safe to update or remove a particular route.

How to remove a router?

Simply click on the delete icon next to the router and it will be removed from your available routers and routes.

You can delete a router at any time

I have more questions

If you have more questions, please feel free to drop us an email at [e-mail] or reach out to us on twitter at CakeAI_ and we will be happy to answer them for you.