I noticed that Twitter search lets you expand URLs from some of the most popular shortening services (though, if they used LongURL they could support a whole lot more ). I liked their UI approach; it’s clear, simple, and effective. So I pretty much mimicked their UI for my plugin.

So here it is, you can add support for LongURL to your site in just a few lines of code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://longurl.org/static/jquery.longurl.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
    $('a').longurl();
});
</script>

Yup, that’s it. Also, if you don’t like the Ajax working indicator that I chose, you can use your own like so:

$(function() {
    $('a').longurl({working_image: 'http://example.com/images/ajaxy_animation.gif'});
});

So, that’s how you use the plugin. You can see a demo of it in action, and download it from the jQuery site. Hope you find it useful.

After getting feedback from some helpful beta testers (thanks Marjolein and Børge!) and making a few tweaks I was happy yesterday to release the LongURL Mobile Expander Greasemokey script and Firefox extension which use the LongURL API to expand shortened URLs on any web page. I haven’t had much feedback from others yet, but for me personally, the extension tremendously improves my user experience. Sorry guys, no more rickrolling me!

Also, with the release of the incredibly awesome Ubiquity extension from Mozilla Labs, I started work on a LongURL command which I hope to finish/release in the next day or so I just released. You can subscribe to the command from the LongURL Tools page. Does that sound like something that would be of interest to you? Have any ideas on how you’d like it to work? If so, leave a comment.

I would like to mention too that this has been the first time I’ve really used the launchpad.net platform for managing my project. It’s been a super experience; I don’t know why I didn’t start using it sooner, especially since I’ve been so close to it. And bazaar? Well, let me just say that I’ll no longer be using Subversion as my VCS of choice. Bazaar rocks, and if you haven’t given it a try, I strongly suggest you do so. You won’t regret it.

A final note: as you can tell, I don’t always get around to blogging about cool stuff I’m working on right away (if at all), so if you’d like to get updates as soon as possible I suggest following me on Twitter (iamseanmurphy) and/or identi.ca (seanmurphy). 140 characters just seems so much more digestible to me.