Here it is: The all-in-one tweet extender and URL shortener, release 0.1
This is a proof-of-concept based on a recent blog post I wrote in wihch I posited that an easy way to create long posts for Twitter would be to combine the data:URI format with a URL-shortening service. This form basically does that. All you have to do is type or paste your text into the form below, click “Shorten” and you’ll be presented with a TinyURL that contains your encoded text. Copy and paste that URL into a Twitter form, and you’re done. The form itself is based on The Data:uri Kitchen, and I’ve chosen TinyURL as the shortener because it has a dead simple API.
Next up: Combine this with the Twitter API, so that you can automatically enter the shortened URL into a tweet.
Note: This works with recent versions of almost all major browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Konqueror. The one exception is Internet Explorer. So, if you’re planning on sharing your long tweets with folks who are still using IE, you’ll have to go elsewhere. And by that I mean go elsewhere and download another browser!
Update: TinyURL seems to have suddenly taken to choking on data URIs, So, it may be back to the drawing board this weekend!
(Photo: kopp0441)
