Windows Live Writer, Twitter Notify and bit.ly? Yep, here’s how…

Aaron's Live Writer Blog - Using bit.ly with The Twitter Notify plug-in for Live Writer

“One of my favorite plug-ins for Windows Live Writer is Twitter Notify which will give you the option to create a tweet on Twitter as part of publishing your blog post.  By default it uses TinyURL as the URL shortener.  The “problem” with TinyURL is that it uses 20 characters whereas newer shorteners use 17 or less characters and with the 140 character limit of Twitter every character counts.

Joe Cheng wrote a blog post, Using alternative URL shorteners with Twitter Notify plugin, and in the main article he explains how to configure the plug-in to use shorteners like is.gd, snipr.com, snurl.com, and cli.gs but I found in the comments of that post that Max Paulousky has explained how to configure it for bit.ly.  What follows are the instructions on how to setup the Twitter Notify plug-in for bit.ly.

First make sure you have the latest version of Twitter Notify.  You can download and install it from the gallery.  http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=6b2b5ffe-936a-4cb3-869c-c01de29de176&bt=9

Second you need to know your username and API Key from bit.ly.  …

…”

I had tried this, using bit.ly, when I did my original post about URL Shorteners and Windows Live Writer, but only very half-heartily and when it didn’t work the first time, because I didn’t know how to setup the URL correctly, I got lazy and gave up.

Luckily Aaron didn’t. He figured it out and better yet shared it with us. :)

So now my Twitter Notify short links should now be using bit.ly. Let’s publish this and see…

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Windows Live Writer, the Twitter plugin and changing its URL Shorter