In preparation for my return to the blogosphere (yes, I say that every December/January and July/August), I’ve been doing some under-the-hood things to the site. This post is about the most recent geek-change.

In the world of URL shorteners, it seems bit.ly has the edge for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, I prefer the j.mp service (which is actually powered by bit.ly, but obviously has a shorter domain name). I’ve been using Alex King‘s Twitter Tools to announce new posts on Twitter for a while now. As of version 2.0, Twitter Tools includes a plugin of it’s own to shorten URLs with bit.ly. This is better than nothing, but not exactly what I want.

Since the technology of bit.ly and j.mp is essentially identical, I think that a bit of find-and-replace PHP hacking will allow me to post using j.mp. I’ve made those changes, uploaded the file, and activated my plugin. Essentially, this is the test post. We’ll see if it works!

Edit: About 20 seconds after posting this entry, the following tweet appeared on Twitter:

@lenflack New post: Custom j.mp Plugin for Twitter Tools http://j.mp/7hRziR #fb

Success!