If you use Twitter you probably use TinyURL to shorten your URLs pretty often, I looked into doing this with Quicksilver, there are a couple of blog posts that show you how to do it, but none of them I really liked. One even said it was crap himself in the beginning of the post.

What I really want is this:

• I would copy the URL I want to shorten to my OS X clipboard
• I run something in Quicksilver
• The clipboard will be updated with the shortened URL

This turned out to be extremely easy to do. Here’s a Ruby script that does exactly that. If you make the script executable, Quicksilver should include it in its catalog. So just copy a long URL into your clipboard (⌘-C), invoke Quicksilver, type the filename (I just type “tiny”), and wola, your clipboard will have the TinyURL so you can paste (⌘-V) it into wherever.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
 
def shorten(args)
  action = 'http://tinyurl.com/create.php'
  field = 'url'
  url = args[:url]
  code = 200
 
  Net::HTTP.start('tinyurl.com', 80) do |h|
    r =  h.post(action, "#{field}=#{url}")
    URI.extract(r.read_body).grep(/tinyurl.com/)[4] if r.code == code.to_s
  end
end
 
IO.popen('pbcopy', 'w').puts "#{shorten(:url => IO.popen('pbpaste', 'r+').read)}"