Case 1: Redirect to another website

Suppose you're addicted to Twitter, and you decide to meditate using Insight Timer whenever you accidentally open Twitter. Let's create a rule for that!

Step 1. Open the "Edit Rule" screen

Let's open the Edit Rule screen to start creating your own rule in the app. You can do this by clicking the plus (+) button in the My Rules tab.

Step 2. Set up "Redirect From"

First, you should set up the Redirect From section in the Edit Rule screen in the app. The targets are URLs starting with https://twitter.com/.

In this case, you can specify the following pattern with the Wildcard mode:

https://twitter.com/*

In the Wildcard mode, * means it matches anything (= zero or more characters).

However, hold on. twitter.com was renamed to x.com. You can simply replace twitter.com with x.com but no one knows when the new owner will change his mind again to roll it back. Therefore, let's target both twitter.com and x.com.

To do that, switch from Wildcard to Regular Expression, and set this as the pattern:

https://(twitter|x).com/.*

• (twitter|x): it targets both twitter and x. (| is called a pipe.)
• .*: It's the same as Wildcard's *. More specifically, . means any character and * means anything before this symbol repeated any number of times, resulting in it matches anything.

Regular Expression is a bit complicated, but once you get used to it, it will be a powerful tool. We recommend using RegExr as a playground to analyze how your Regular Expression pattern works.

tip

In Regular Expressions, . in (twitter|x).com is also treated as any character. Therefore, (twitter|x).com/.* also matches, for example, twitter1com/ or x_com/.

To be more precise, you can change it to (twitter|x)\.com/.*. \ is used to treat . as a literal period character rather than a special character.

However, there are no such URLs in the general internet environment. Therefore, you can leave . as a special character if you prefer.

Step 3: Set up "Redirect To"

Simply specify the URL as follows:

https://insighttimer.com/saraauster/guided-meditations/calm

(Optional) Step 4: Check the rule

You can check how the rule works by adding a example URL in the Examples section in the Edit Rule screen. For instance, if you enter https://x.com/UN, it shows https://insighttimer.com/saraauster/guided-meditations/calm as the result.

Here's what your rule should look like now:

⬇️ Download the Rule

Now, Redirect Web brings you to the meditation when you access Twitter!