Opinionated

Tweet This! links with bit.ly and Tumblr

I wanted to have a nice ‘Tweet this!’ link on my entries that would automatically create a Tweet for people who click it. I looked around a bit and found a great implementation on bit.ly. It comes with automatic URL shortening too! Here’s what you need to do:

First of all you hit ‘Customize’ on your dashboard. Then hit ‘Theme’ and click ‘Custom HTML’. This will give you the code of whatever theme you’re currently using.

Somewhere in your {Posts} section, add the following code:

Note: the dashboard rendering of this post destroys the code. View the post on my actual Tumblelog to copy/paste the code!

{block:PermalinkPage} <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://bit.ly/javascript-api.js?version=latest&login=tweettrackjs&apiKey=R_7e9987b2fd13d7e4e881f9cbb168f523"></script><script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://s.bit.ly/TweetAndTrack.js?v=1.01"></script><a href="#" onclick="return TweetAndTrack.open(this, '{Permalink}');"><span style="display:none;">Reading from @YOUR_TWITTER_ID on Tumblr: {block:Title}{Title}{/block:Title}</span>Tweet this!</a> {block:PermalinkPage}

Of course you enter your Twitter ID instead of ‘YOUR_TWITTER_ID’ in this bit of code. In fact, you can modify the entire bit that says ‘Reading from @YOUR_TWITTER_ID on Tumblr: ’ and change it into whatever you want.

Now where exactly do you put this? This depends on the theme you’re using. Put it somewhere in the footer part of a post and you should be fine. I put everything inside a {block:PermalinkPage}{/block:PermalinkPage} because for some reason {Title} doesn’t output anything on pages with more than one post when used outside a post type block and because I felt this feature makes more sense on individual entry pages anyway.

Important warning: If you change to another theme through the theme garden, the changes you made will be wiped out. Be careful!

Enjoy!