I finally got around to adding the twitterlution plugin from Lee Turner and it works great. One thing I noticed was the long URLs from my blog being sent to twitter. Other than that, I am extremely happy with the plugin.

I wondered how hard it would be to add a URL shortener (bit.ly in this case) to the plugin. It turned out to be fairly straight forward.

First I went and got a userid and apikey to bit.ly

Then I searched for an example of making a call to bit.ly from php and I found this example by James Cridland

Then I added the Services_JSON module to my web server

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Then I knitted it all together - see the code snippets for the pertinent parts.

First I added a reference to the Services_JSON module in the plugin php file.

Then I added the following to the GetDefaultUserSettings function:

PHP:

Then I added the function from James Cridland's example, with the following modification:

PHP:

Finally, I changed the ItemSendPing function with this one line modification (where the new function to shorten the URL was called):

PHP:

Thanks to Lee Turner for a great plugin and to James Cridland for giving us an easy way to call bit.ly.

Cheers,
Dave