As I’m sure you already know, I’ve created the rc3dotorg Twitter account so that I can let people on Twitter know when I’ve published something. One unfortunate side effect has been that it has complicated my workflow when I write new posts.

Normally I just compose the post in MarsEdit and hit the publish button. I’m sure the process could be greatly simplified, but for two things that complicate the process. The first is that I like to use short URLs that I furnish myself, and the second is that I like to compose the tweets by hand.

I publish this blog using WordPress, and I use the le petite url plugin to create short links. Most of the time I publish updates to Twitter using Tweetie.

So here’s my workflow these days:

  1. Compose a post in MarsEdit and publish it.
  2. Go to the WordPress application on the server and navigate to the new post so I can copy the short link.
  3. Open my Twitter client and write a new tweet, then publish that.

The main inconvenience is opening WordPress in the browser once I’ve already gone to the trouble to write the post somewhere else. What I need is a tool that will allow me to access the internally generated short URL and compose a Tweet from MarsEdit that can be published whenever the blog post itself is published.

It’s looking like I’m going to need to write my own WordPress plugin to do exactly what I want. There are a ton of Twitter plugins, I think I’ll just have to find the right one and adapt it to my needs.

More later.