Sunday, August 21, 2011

TweetMonkey allows you to tweet from any page on the web - now Google Chrome extension supports OAuth

TweetMonkey is a web browser tool that allows you to post messages on Twitter from any web page on the spot. With this application, It takes just a few clicks to tweet.

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Last year, I built a Google Chrome extension for TweetMonkey.

TweetMonkey allows you to tweet from any page on the web - latest Google Chrome version has been released.

Shortly after this release, however, Twitter stopped offering Basic Authentication. All Twitter clients are now required to support OAuth. Implementing OAuth was so painful that it took me a long time to complete the OAuth supported version of TweetMonkey.

Prerequisites
All you need should be the latest version of Google Chrome. Mine is version 13.0.782.112 on Mac.
Google Chrome on Windows should also work.

How to install
Click on the link below to start the installation. You will be navigated to Chrome Web Store.

Install TweetMonkey now

Once the installation is completed, you will be navigated to a Twitter page and asked to authorize TweetMonkey to access to your Twitter account. Please authorize it (you can always disallow it by logging out on the option screen). Twitter page will show it as "TweetMonkeyEx" but this is what you want to get. Please be assured.

How to use
You left-click on the TweetMonkey icon and will see a pop up show up. Enter a text and click on "Update" button to tweet. You can also enter the title and a shorten URL of the active tab by clicking on the chain icon.

Right-click TweetMonkey icon in the right top corner of Chrome and choose "Option". Once the option screen shows up, you can log out and prevent TweetMonkey from accessing to your Twitter account.

Have fun!

References
This time, I check out so many websites to gather the information. I would like to show my gratitude to all the authors. Especially, I learned a lot on how to implement OAuth and Google Chrome extension from Twitter Notifier. I would like to thank its auther, Peter Josling.

Source code
You can get a file called tweet_monkey.crx from the download link above. This is the extension file but it is merely a zipped file. Once you unzip it, you can have a look at source code of this software.

Maybe I should post this to Chrome Webstore to reach broader audience. Before making this extension public, I would like to change the icon of the application. This "t" shape icon was taken from an old Twitter official website, so I need to change it to something original. If you could help me, please give me a shout. I would be very grateful.

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