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Read more commentsIntegrating Twitter with SelectCMS, Part 2
By Mark Bell, Web Developer
In my last post, I explained the basic technical integration of Twitter into SelectCMS. This time I'm going to talk about some of Twitter's limitations, and how we used some external web services to get around the particular problem we had.
Twitter has a limit of 140 characters per message, hence the term 'micro-blogging'. This is all part of the immediacy of Twitter; information is read and posted in bite-size chunks, which is all very well until it comes to posting links. Web addresses are usually fairly lengthy, especially since all the sites we build use search engine friendly URL's which contain keywords, e.g:
http://www.webselect.net/blog/selectcms-and-twitter-part-1/
The example URL above is 59 characters in length; if you pasted it into a tweet it would take up almost half of the character limit, leaving you very little room to explain to your readers what it links to! The answer to this problem is URL shortening. You've probably already seen shortened URLs in your internet travels - they look like this:
A URL shortener is basically a separate web site with a shorter web address that redirects to the URL you supply it with. The short URL above points to the same page as the longer original above, but is only 20 characters, giving you an extra 39 for text in your update.
There are lots of these services around, the best known being Tinyurl.com and Bit.ly. Bit.ly is the preferred shortening service of Twitter itself, and it also has an API (Application Programming Interface) which allows us to use it directly from within our code.
When you type a URL into the Twitter text box in SelectCMS, our system automatically sends that URL out to the Bit.ly service in the background, which sends back a shortened version. When it receives the short URL, SelectCMS automatically replaces the original URL in the text box, as you type.
If you would like a demonstration of SelectCMS, please email us or give us a call on 01626 855400.
Want to comment on this? Email us at info@webselect.net
