PowerMail is a Mango Blog plugin that improves on the mail utility included with Mango. In particular, it adds BCC support (useful for plugin developers who want to send email with a BCC), and enables you to connect to SMTP servers that require SSL or TLS authentication and/or a custom port number; including GMail and Google Mail for Domains.
Posted in My projects | Mango | 2 Responses January 13 2010
A little bit less than a year ago I created an open source CFC and companion Mango Blog plugin called SweetTweets that would search for shortened links to your blog entries on Twitter and display any tweets found in a manner similar to TrackBacks. (Note that this wasn't my idea, Dan Zarella invented and pioneered it, I just made a ColdFusion version.) At the time, I was really excited about the project and it seemed to be fairly popular; it even got included in the BlogCFC core, which made my week.
Unfortunately, I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I personally view TweetBacks as nearly dead, if not completely dead. Functionally, they still work the same as they did when I originally released SweetTweets in January of 2009. What's changed is market share. In May, Twitter switched their integrated URL shortening service from TinyURL to Bitly, and within days Bitly's market share overtook TinyURL. You can get the latest statistics at Tweetmeme but the rankings from the last 24 hours have Bitly in 1st place with over 57% of shortened urls, and TinyURL in a distant 2nd place with a mere 6.85%.
The biggest problem is that Bitly doesn't repeat a short URL. If I shorten the URL http://www.google.com with Bitly, I get http://bit.ly/14d7yE. I bet that if you do the same thing, you won't get the same short URL. This behavior is bad for tweetbacks because we rely on being able to predict the shortened url and search for it. If everyone gets a different short url, then we can't predict what it will be, and thus we can't search for it. Your tweetback is out there, we just can't find it.
This isn't to say that Bitly is evil or anything. I'm sure they have their reasons -- chief among them is probably being able to track click statistics, and if everyone gets the same short url then there's no easy way to tell whose post of that url was the source of the click. That alone could give Twitter something to monetize, so while I'm not particularly fond of the move from TinyURL to Bitly, I understand it.
One option is to just kill SweetTweets. That probably won't happen. Instead, I will probably release an update that pares down the list of supported url shorteners to just TinyURL and Is.Gd. That means that a majority of potential tweetbacks will still be un-searchable, and therefore NOT found and NOT listed on your blog. Unfortunately, we can't just support every URL shortener under the sun (that keeps 1 unique short url per long url), because the twitter search API has a length limit; so we can only support the top N. Right now that's TinyURL and maybe 1 or 2 others.
I wish it didn't have to come to this, but it has. I thought about asking if anyone is aware of a way to reverse-lookup shortened bitly urls, but even if we could, in a practical sense we would run out of room in just a few links. I'm a little sad, but I guess this is the best we can do with what we've got.
Posted in My projects | Mango | Twitter | 4 Responses January 04 2010