Consolerium games guru Charile Love has come up with a pile of interesting stuff linked to his work and glow. A while back he published a guide to Creating Your Custom Glow Theme which has been very useful for me. Recently he has produce a url shortner for glow Glo.li with a web interface, glow webpart: Making Glow Better with glo.li and wordpress pluging and the Internet Explorer and Firefox Toolbar Alphas (with integrated Glow Search) now in beta all very much worth checking out if you use glow.

URL shortners are not necessarly a good thing I don’t think they have much place on blog posts or web pages. There a a couple of places they are handy, twitter with its 140 char limitation and printed material. Newspapers often use them and I’ve found thenm useful for printend notes. I also imagine they are worth using with children in glow. A typical glow url, say:

https://portal.glowscotland.org.uk/establishments/nationalsite/International%20Children’s%20Games/ICG%20Activities/Lists/Pages/D4.aspx

is not an easy one to put on the board for kids to type http://glo.li/9hzYzG is a lot simpler.

Charlie’s Toolbar has glo.li built in making it really easy to grab a shortened url from any page in fireFox and Internet Explorer. Unfortunatly for me I am pretty welded to the Safari browser so can’t install the toolbar (I guess someone could make an extension for glo.li) but I did already use applescript with tinyurl for shortening links. I am not sure how many other glow users use applescript too but here is how it works:

I commented on Charlie’s blog post asking about acces to gloli via the command line and he kindly explained it to me. I wrapped this up into an appleScript which I assign a keyboard shortcut via FastScripts (I’ve blogged about FastScripts before). Now I just press command-alt-control-g to get the url for the current page displated in Safari onto my clipboard ready to paste. I’ve posted the script and how to do this here: glo.li url shortner applescript just incase anyone is interested. The script does include the easiest/lasziest way to strip html I’ve manged to figure out.

If you are a glow user I suggest that you check out Charlie’s blog straight away.