For some reason I’ve wanted to create my own URL shortener just for my stuff for some time now. It’s finally here: the jbe.me URL shortener. Now, I’m the only one that can use the service; it’s only for my links, but when you see a jbe.me URL you at least know it will link to something I’ve done.

It was super simple to setup.

First of all, I had to buy the jbe.me domain name ( think J B dot ME ). Unfortunatly jb.me is not a valid domain, I’m sure someone much more important than I will grab it. Anyway, jbe.me was the next best thing.

One I had the domain I installed the YOURLS (You Own URL Shortener) script at that location. It’s a series of scripts that talks to a MySQL database with some pretty cool bookmarklets and an API. The API was key for the next step: the Twitter Tools extension. As many people know, I use twitter tools to post new blog entries to my twitter profile. Since I want to get as much of my URL-shortening as possible done through the jbe.me shortener now I needed to get twitter tools to use the new system. Twitter Tools has it’s own api that will let you create a shortener for any service that you could think of with some hooks that it install for WordPress. Then I threw a plugin together using the YOURLS API and now when I publish a post, Twitter Tools uses the jbe.me shortener to shorten the URLs. Pretty Cool.

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I’ve been playing around with backing up my tweets lately. At this point I’m using the Twitter Tools plugin to create a weekly digest. Since I created a Tumble-blog not to long ago to share social stuff like this I also wanted the tweets to go to tumblr. Part of this was just a way to clean up Tumblr and not create a new post everytime I tweet.

Now, having the tweets on the blog is mostly for me. I didn’t want to bombard people that are subscribed to the RSS feed with this weekly mashup of all my tweets, but still be able to have the RSS feed to send to Tumblr or for anybody that wants it.

This is what I ended up doing:

function tweetRSS123($query) {
if ($query->is_feed && !is_category()) {
$query->set(‘cat’,’-1′);
}
return $query;
}

add_filter(‘pre_get_posts’,’tweetRSS123′);

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