Cli.gs and the iPhone – Part 3 (Twitterfon)

Twitterfon is definitely my favourite Twitter client for the iPhone.  Although I still haven’t tried Tweetie but according to this post there really isn’t much in it.  So I was excited earlier this evening to discover the bookmarklet on the Naan Studio website (hadn’t realised that they also produced the excellent Twitterfox add-in for Firefox as well).

On using the bookmark I noticed whilst it posts shortish URL’s in full for long URL’s it uses the tinyurl.com shortener.  I’ve nothing against tinyurl, in fact many years ago I used to use them extensively when sending bulk email however today there are much better URL shortners to choose from.  So I hacked together a little PHP script to create private cli.gs (N.B. you’ll need to add your cli.gs API key in the place indicated).

<?php
$url = $_GET['url'];
$title = $_GET['title'];
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://cli.gs/api/v1/cligs/create?
              key=[API key goes here]&appid=BFphpscript&url=".urlencode($url)."&title=".urlencode($title));
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
header("location: twitterfon:///post?".$output);
?>

You’d then need to call it in the usual way – i.e. via a bookmark of

javascript:(function(){%20window.open('[location of php script]?url='
+encodeURIComponent(location.href)%20+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title));%20})();

I’m hoping that eventually I’ll figure out a better final line of the php script, i.e. something that can transfer more than just the URL over to Twitter, unfortunately there’s very little documentation for Twitterfon, the only thing I found other than on the Naan website was this piece from someone who had a similar idea of using a php script a couple of weeks ago.

Php files and the iphone

I’m beginning to think that php files offer an unrivalled way of doing things quickly with the iPhone.

Simply save the file and add the link to the file as a bookmark in Safari.

My most recent effort is a quickly hacked together page which updates my location on Twitter. I simply call the page and my location is updated, a process that otherwise I find quite convoluted (it’s the one missing feature from Twitterfon, although Twitterfon does allow lat/long coordinate updates).

Generally I am in one of three places, at home in Cov, in London at work or in between on the train. So I have four php files (all based on twitter.lib.php file from php classes) bookmarked in Safari, one for each of the three common locations and one for if I am elsewhere (this script has a text input box rather than the location value hard coded).