Shorten URL Plugin for Pidgin
Posted by Stefan on June 24, 2009
Pidgin is a great chat client. It allows the user to connect to multiple chat networks simultaneously through an easy to use and very intuitive interface. I use it all the time to stay in touch with my friends / family / coworkers and I’m very happy I don’t have to install a different client for each chat network I want to connect to.
But since I started using Twitter this has changed. Now I had to install another client just to receive and post tweets and it was very annoying. As Miguel de Icaza likes to say “Twitter is IRC for young people” so it seems natural to be accessed from the chat client like all other networks.
After a quick search on the Net I found tweet.IM, a free service offered by ProcessOne which enables you to use a micro-blogging platform with a chat client. It basically adds a bot to your contacts list that forwards periodically new updates from your Twitter feed to your messaging account. It also allows you to post updates by forwarding messages to the bot. Using this service made Pidgin a nice Twitter client but it had two problems: it lacked character counting and URL shortening.
For the first issue I found Dossy’s excelent character counting plugin, but I couldn’t find anything for URL shortening so… I made one 
Shorten URL is a very simple Pidgin plugin. It adds a new button on the conversation window’s toolbar that pops up a dialog which allows you to shrink an URL using a specialized web service.
By default it uses is.gd because it creates very small URL’s. Initially I wanted to support many services but I could not find an easy way to add a combo box to the dialog. I still plan to add this in the future, when I find some time to dig more in the Pidgin’s API. Right now the only way to modify the service is to change the source and recompile the code.
You can download the plugin as a precompiled Windows DLL that can be copied in you Pidgin’s plugins folder, or you can take the source code and compile it for any platform that Pidgin runs on.
Enjoy!
Tim said
Hi
I was exactly looking for such a plugin,
however the link to the dll gives an error,
would you mind sending it to me or adding it back ?
thanks.
Stefan said
Hi Tim
For some reason SkyDrive refuses to serve the dll file. It is there, but when you try to access it it doesn’t work. I updated the link to point to an archived version which should download fine.
Hope you like the plugin!
intoxicadocoder said
Thanks it is very useful