Microblogging With urlTea - My Twitter Bookmarklet
As you know I’m trying the whole Mini-Blog thing now as a way of microblogging my thoughts - mostly on links to pages/stories I come across. Using a Twitter account and a plug-in called Twitter Tools from Alex King, I can show my Mini Blog on the left side, and then all the mini-blog entries/tweets for the day (using GMT time, unfortunately) get posted into a daily blog entry the next day. It’s a real cool tool.
Using Twitter for microblogging has become popular especially because Twitter will take any link it finds in your tweet and HTMLize it. One problem that I came across, though, was the cumbersome way of getting links and context into the tweet - a lot of copying and pasting going on. Because of the 140 character limit, Twitter has some kind of feature where it uses TinyUrl to shorten the urls posted into the status, but I couldn’t find a bookmarklet that would include the page title and a selection of text. Reason being, probably, this isn’t a highly requested feature. So I tried writing my own.
I did it in a somewhat cumbersome way, by using a bookmarklet to get the page URL, title, and selected text and call a PHP form that uses JSON to connect to the urlTea url shortening service. It then autoposts the form to the Twitter status window ready to be updated. All of this in a pop-up window and, of course, assuming you’re already signed into Twitter. I let Twitter handle the character count and any additional editing - especially when the page title and selected text become too long. The page title, the urlTea shortened link, and any selected text are copied in that order separated by a space.
The bookmarklet is a simple link that contains javascript. You drag it to your link toolbar (or just bookmark it from the right-click menu) and click it whenever you want to microblog. (If you’re new to bookmarklets - they’re an awesome timesaver. Check out the other bookmarklets I use.) I’m sure this smacks of hackery and is rife with style infractions. I offer no appologies or warranties. Take it and make it yours if you like it. Or just use the bookmarklet here and let me know how it works.
Update (11/14/07): So after looking over a few pages, and the inexplicable problems I had with the JSON api, I’ve updated the script to use the regular API. Which I can switch to use TinyUrl if I need to. I suppose I could then have it use the twitter API but I want the intermediate editing step.
The PHP page is real simple and portable:
<?php
$url = $_GET[”url”];
$title = $_GET[”title”];
$text = $_GET[”text”];
// $urlt = file_get_contents(”http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=” . $url);
$urlt = file_get_contents(”http://urltea.com/api/text/?url=” . $url);
?><html>
<head>
<title>myopiclunacy.com’s Twitter urlTea submitter</title>
</head>
<body>
<form name=twit id=twit method=”get” action=”http://twitter.com/home”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”status” value=”<?php echo $title; ?> <?php echo $urlt; ?> <?php echo $text; ?>”>
</form>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
status = document.forms[0].status;
status.value=unescape(status.value.replace(/\\’/g,”‘”));
document.forms[0].submit();
</script>
</body>
If you’re looking for something for the Blackberry - check out this article from Tao of Mac.
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