Twidge, Shorten URL & Mustard

I've found an unusual solution to using Identi.ca on my old P4 desktop that I thought I'd share. To be fair it's a split solution between my desktop my new Samsung Galaxy Portal Android phone. I found that any GUI Twitter / Identi.ca client consumes quite a few resources to have sitting open all the time on the notification applet, some are worse than others. So I now split it with Twidge, Shorten URL and Mustard.

For regular text dents I read and reply with Mustard on the phone, but posting links to web pages, or shrinking them into shortened URLs seems a bit more difficult. I'm guessing that's my lack of understanding but for now it just seems difficult. So I have a different but lightweight solution to dents involving urls. It;s a combination of Twidge and the Shorten URL addon for Firefox.

Mustard speaks for itself, although I did switch it to the older layout and disabled the long press as I find it more intuitive. Mustard is a very nice and responsive Android Identi.ca client. This post is about Twidge and Shorten URL.

Twidge is a CLI application, which means it's very light. I am only using it as a quick poster but it can do much more. Installing Twidge on an Ubuntu based distro is as simple as:

sudo apt-get install twidge

After installing it will create a .twidgerc file in your /home folder. You will need to fill in a few details here. So open with any plain text editor, I'll use gEdit in the example:

gedit ~/.twidgerc

It's pretty straightforward, feel free to copy this one and edit the password and username parts to suit.

[DEFAULT]
password: yourpassword
username: youridenticaname
urlbase: http://identi.ca/api

Save and close that file and you're ready to rock. Now the syntax:

twidge update "Hello world!"

This will post the message Hello world! to your Identi.ca / Statusnet account. Simple huh? Everything between the "" is sent, remember that it's still only 140 characters.

twidge lscommands

This will list all the commands twidge responds to. I got this information from the Twidge project site. There are guides there on how to get it to post to Twitter, or both Twitter & Identi.ca or email etc. I only needed the basics but if you want to explore what it can do, feel free.

Now we look at the posting of short URLs.

With the Shorten URL addon enabled, you visit the page you want to dent and right click, one of the options is "Shorten this page URL". This will take a few seconds and turn the url in the address bar into a shortened one and optionally copy it to the clipboard. You can select which shortening service to use from the prefs. A simple middle click on the mouse will paste it into the terminal. Some terminals will have a keyboard paste shortcut set up too or right click and paste option.

The eagle eyed among you will notice that my Identi.ca announcement of this post will have "posted from Twidge" on it.