Ever started reply­ing to some­one on Twit­ter, know­ing as you did it that there’s no way you could fit it all into 140 char­ac­ters? Did it drag on into two, three, four tweets, clut­ter­ing up everyone’s list? Twixt can help.

Hav­ing done just that sev­eral times, I was after a sim­ple, dis­pos­able way of putting more than 140 char­ac­ters up some­where on the inter­net that I can link from a sin­gle tweet. Thus, I cre­ated this sim­ple PHP script. Give it a block of text, and it’ll gen­er­ate you a unique web page and grab you an bit.ly short URL for it.

Visit twixt.successwhale.com to try it out!

API

Twixt also pro­vides an API for use by appli­ca­tions such as my own Suc­cess­Whale. To use it, sim­ply pro­vide it with a prop­erly URLEn­coded “tweet” argu­ment, for example:

http://twixt.successwhale.com/index.php?tweet=Hello%20World!

Twixt will return the text-format out­put page of bit.ly’s “shorten” API, which will be either an HTTP 200 OK con­tain­ing the short­ened URL, or an HTTP 500 Inter­nal Server Error con­tain­ing the error message.

Sta­tus

Twixt is mature, released soft­ware, and as far as I know there are no major bugs that affect it. If you find any bugs or would like to request any new fea­tures, please con­tact me via my con­tact form. If you’d like to sub­mit bug reports and fea­ture requests directly into my Man­tis server, please reg­is­ter an account and do so.

Licence and Source Code

Suc­cess­Whale is licenced under the GNU GPL v3. If you’d like to run this from your own web­site, you can get the source code from GitHub. To run it, you’ll need a web server that can run PHP, and the direc­tory the script sits in must be world-writable (chmod 777). To use the API mode, you’ll have to reg­is­ter with bit.ly to get a user­name and API key, then insert those at the top of Twixt’s index.php.