Hi there!

Lots of you may use WordPress as blog system. Lots of you may also use a Twitter account. I guess, most of those people will use the famous Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King (http://alexking.org/) to automatically notify Twitter about your new WordPress blog posts.

What happens while WordPress notifies Twitter?

Well, the Plugin sends a notification to your Twitter account and, of course, tweets the URL of your new post. Since this URL is usually very long, Twitter uses (for some reason) tinyurl.com to shorten this URL. And this is, what I really hated. Really hated!

That’s the reason why I wrote the new unfake.it-API. Just as soon, as the API worked, I wrote a very tiny and very simple WordPress plugin to enhance Twitter Tools. The plugin tells the Twitter Tools plugin to shorten URLs using my unfake.it-API before sending the URL of the new post to Twitter.

The faked URL is short enough and Twitter doesn’t need to shorten it with tinyurl.com.

Also see: http://unfake.it/help.php#twitter-tools

So, all of you using WordPress and Twitter, you may (and should 🙂 ) use this plugin.

  1. download the plugin here
  2. expand the archive into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  3. create a folder named tt_unfake_it (should have happend automatically by unzipping the archive) in your wp-contents/plugins/ directory.
  4. put the tt_unfake_it.php file into the wp-content/plugins/tt_unfake_it/ directory (should have happend automatically by unzipping the archive).
  5. go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate’ for ‘unfake.it URL shortener for Twitter Tools’.
  6. use WordPress as usual

Of course, you have to check “Notify Twitter about this post?” at the bottom of the editing page when writing a new post!

That’s it 🙂

Once again: this is a plugin which depends on Twitter Tools by Alex King.

Have fun and please let me know, if you’re experiencing any problems.

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  • michelle albee:

    thanks for your blog.. I really hate when twitter shortens the url’s too. I will definately download your tool. Thanks!!

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