Deflexion.com

Twitter, TinyURL, Dots, Dashes, and My htaccess File

2008-03-25T08:57:00.005Z

After a number of experiments and reading & participating in the twitter-development-talk mailing list, I can now tweet about updates to my pages without Twitter converting my URLs to TinyURLs. First, here's what I've learned about Twitter and TinyURLs:

If a URL path in a tweet contains only forward slashes (/), dots (.), and alphanumeric characters, Twitter does not convert the URL to a TinyURL.

I plan to start tweeting about pages when I update them and if a page's URL contains dashes, tweet it with the dashes replaced by dots. For example, the tweet about this blog item uses this URL:

http://deflexion.com/2008/03/twitter.tinyurl.dots.dashes.and.my

The .htaccess file on my server includes this line:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/(2008/../[^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)$ http://deflexion.com/$1-$2-$3-$4-$5-$6

which redirects the URL to this:

http://deflexion.com/2008/03/twitter-tinyurl-dots-dashes-and-my

which is the actual URL of the blog item. This way I maintain control of URLs that lead to my pages and TinyURL does not get to track and profile people who visit my pages via my tweets.

If you have a suggestion for a better way to do this, please post a comment. For example, I'm wondering if it would be better to use RewriteCond & RewriteRule rather than RedirectMatch in my .htaccess file. Some thoughts about this are in WhenNotToUseRewrite in the Apache Documentation Wiki.

A Blogger And Twitter Experiment

2008-03-21T10:47:00.004Z

This is step 1 of an experiment, the title is currently A.Blogger.And.Twitter.Experiment. Details after I find out what happens...

Update 1: Step 2 is to change the title to A Blogger And Twitter Experiment (dots replaced by spaces).

Update 2: Here's what I learned: If you change a Blogger blog item title, the original URL is preserved. You can use this trick as a way to create a blog item URL that does not contain the dash character (-) and thus won't be TinyURLed by Twitter. The URL of this blog item is deflexion.com/2008/03/abloggerandtwitterexperiment and I link to it from this Twitter item.

But, I'd rather that Twitter gave users the ability to turn off TinyURLing!

Subscribing to a Google Group Without a Google Account

2008-02-01T15:16:00.000Z

I just subscribed to the Twitter Development Talk mailing list and it took me a while to figure out how to subscribe without signing in to my Google account. To make it easy to remember how to do this, I'm posting the details here. The first step is to go to the About this group page and look for this line:

Group email twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com

Next, use your email client to compose a message like this:


From: username@example.com
To: twitter-development-talk-subscribe@googlegroups.com
Subject: subscribe

where the From: address is the email address that you would like to receive the list mail, and the To: address includes the string -subscribe before the @ symbol. After you send this subscription request, you will need to confirm the subscription request.

Note that not all Google Groups support email subscriptions.

See Also: Google Help > Google Groups Help > Getting started > The basics > How do I subscribe to a group?