How to Make YOURLS.org Work in Tweetbot

We are big fans of Tweetbot here at 2FatDads, ever since Twitter started to tear all of the goodness out of Tweetie, we jumped ship and started toying around with other clients until we finally discovered Tweetbot.

However one of the big key tools that Twitter striped out of Tweetie that we really liked was the Custom URL Shortner service. We use YOURLS here and have always found it important that we be able to tell our readers and followers that the link we are using has been 2FatDads approved. So with the release of Tweetbot 2.0, we noticed that Custom API Endpoints where available and that we could, once again, use our own YOURLS server to to shorten links.

Services

• URL Shortening via Twitter, bit.ly Pro, CloudApp, Custom API Endpoints

However trying to find out how to do it was not very easy. So lets walk it though and hopefully help out a few others along the way.

First you will need to log into your YOURLS admin page and recuperate your secret token and the structure for the “Secure passwordless API call” it will a little like this:

http://SITE/yourls-api.php?signature=SECRETTOKEN&format=simple&action=shorturl&url=%@

Where SITE is your domain name and folder structure leading up to the yourls-api.php file. for example ours in http://2fatdads.com/u/

Next SECRETTOKEN is the site specific code that appears on the YOURLS tool page.

And finally %@ is the specific call to the URL being handed over for shortening.

And with that, any link you share via Tweetbot will be shortened using your own YOURLS server and not t.co or bit.ly.

via Tweetbot — Tapbots.

[__UPDATE__] This has been verified to work with TweetBot 3 which is iOS 7 ready.