Otto on WordPress

So I added the new Tweet button to Simple Twitter Connect yesterday, and was going through the documentation they provided for it. One thing I noticed was a mention of the “count API”.

Now, Twitter says that the count API is private, but come on.. Seriously? You’re sending count information to every Tweet button being displayed anywhere, how private can that really be?

Turns out it’s not private at all. It’s just hidden.

To get the tweet count for any URL, simply do a GET for this:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=URL-TO-GET-COUNT-FOR

What you’ll get back will look like this:

twttr.receiveCount({"count":123,"url":"URL-TO-GET-COUNT-FOR"})

Some of you may recognize that as a JSON callback. Basically, they’re using part of their @anywhere system to receive the count and update the button accordingly. Not surprising, the whole tweet button is built on top of the anywhere code. But it’s kinda useless to us in this format, since we need to be able to define our callback appropriately instead of using theirs. No worries, just add a callback parameter yourself:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=URL-TO-GET-COUNT-FOR&callback=bob

bob({"count":123,"url":"URL-TO-GET-COUNT-FOR"})

Obviously, they didn’t release this information because they’re concerned about scaling, and probably rightfully so. Still, if you want that count, you can get it. Just don’t abuse it.

Took a look at @anywhere a little while ago. With my experience working with the Facebook javascript methods, it was rather trivial to incorporate the new javascript functionality from Twitter into Simple Twitter Connect, so that was exactly what I did.

Simple Twitter Connect 0.7 now automatically enables your site to run the new @anywhere code. With zero extra configuration steps.

All the example javascript code they give on the @anywhere documentation site will work immediately.

I even added an example plugin (STC-Linkify) to demonstrate how it works. Activate that plugin and it will automatically link any Twitter usernames on your page to Twitter. So when I type @ottodestruct or @otto42, they’re automatically linked. Neat, eh?

I’ll be adding several more @anywhere plugins to the package soon, but those will be in the next update. If you want them in advance, then you can see the trunk version of the plugin and pick and choose which you want. I’ve already added the Follow Button widget to there, so you can go get it now if you like. I’m already using it here in my sidebar.

If you subscribe to the Twitter account that is hooked up to my blog entries, then you might have saw a test tweet earlier. That’s because I was testing. Now I’m not, and I just pushed Simple Twitter Connect 0.5 out for release.

New features:

- Made the comments plugin smarter. The Settings page allows the “Send to Twitter” button on comments to be disabled. Just leave the field blank and voila, no more checkbox.

- The Tweetmeme script now uses HTML comments properly. This prevents the tweetmeme javascript stuff from showing up in weird places, like in the feed and in the Simple Facebook Connect Publish/Share sections.

- And the big one: Automatic Tweeting on Post Publish. It supports auto-tweeting to an alternate Twitter account than your own (useful if you have a multi-user blog). Manual publishing will be coming soon, but I suspect it will not support the alternate account functionality, for simplicity. It would be confusing and hard to use.

Note: that last one is a bit beta. Don’t be surprised by bugs and odd behavior. Don’t rely on it working every time, because it probably won’t. But when it does work, it works great. Here’s this post, auto-tweeted: http://twitter.com/ottodestruct/status/10934354229

I updated Simple Twitter Connect to version 0.4. New stuff:

Login message

The Login plugin now correctly displays an error message when somebody attempts to login as a user that isn’t recognized yet. This should prevent confusion about why “login doesn’t work” after activating the plugin.

Tweetmeme button

New Tweetmeme button plugin added. STC was already perfectly compatible with the existing TweetMeme plugins, but for completeness (and because it was easy), I added this. It’s much like the SFC Share plugin, really.

Note: In the future, an actual STC Share plugin will be created, which will send tweets directly from your own Twitter Application, instead of through TweetMeme. That will be a sorta replacement for this, in that it will have the same basic functionality.

Shortlink support (or lack thereof)

I made the plugin give more information about shortlinks and how they work. Basically, I’m not going to support shortlinks directly. There’s just too many of them. Instead, I have put in support for generic shortlink plugins. The idea here is that anybody can make a plugin to do some form of shortlink support, and this plugin can then use it automatically.

How this idea works:
1. A shortlink plugin author implements this function: “get_shortlink($post_id)”.
2. That’s it. Do that and the plugin will use it.

Any plugin author creating a shortlink plugin should be able to easily do this. In fact, one already has. If you use the WordPress.com Stats plugin, then you automatically get “wp.me” style shortlinks. STC will use them because they implement this function in a pluggable way.

This is also the best solution for people who prefer to implement their own shortlinks in some custom manner. All they need to do is to create a get_shortlink function that returns the shortlink string, and voila, it’ll be used.

So, there you go. Enjoy.