one red speaker

Some of you may have noticed my test activity here on one red speaker and Twitter. Sorry about the noise.

I’ve been posting more pictures from my iPhone to Twitter that I had expected. Tweetie just makes it too easy to push to their built-in image services. Here’s a screenshot of my last upload:

You can click on the screenshot to see it full-size. My succulent ribs are sharing the screen with some T&A courtesy of Hot Clips and a list of top Yfrog users including The Jonas Brothers. Gross.

So, I looked at the the other image services that Tweetie offers, and it was more of the same. The last option, though, is a custom image service. You can give it any URL, and as long as it mimics the TwitPic API, you’re good to go. I whipped up a PHP script that does the following:

• Accepts the image upload from Tweetie
• Uploads the image to one red speaker’s media library
• Creates a new post titled with the tweet and containing just the image
• Gets the permalink for the post
• Shortens the permalink with bit.ly

Tweetie gets back the shortened URL and appends it to the tweet just as it does with every other service. The only downside I see is that you don’t get the preview thumbnail that you get with the built-in services when viewing it within Tweetie. The benefits, however, are awesome: I get to control the presentation of my content, and one red speaker gets a few more posts.

Let me know if you’re interested in the script. I’ll clean it up and push it to GitHub.

Now I’m wondering if I should run my own URL shortener…