Option to always use shortening service

[stephenjudge]

I like to follow the statistics of the URL's I creat with Bit.ly and so I would like all my short URL's to be created with Bit.ly. It would be nice to have an option in Copy ShortURL that allows you to ignore the canonical short URL provided but the website and always use the chosen shortening service.

[fwenzel]

That's a very good point! I still have to figure out how to make a preference page with the Mozilla Add-ons SDK (the framework Copy ShortURL is written with), and then I'll definitely make that an option. Thanks for your suggestion!

[stephenjudge]

Cool, thanks, even if there was a way to do it in the about:config options, like for the Custom URL options that would do.

[stephenjudge]

Oops, I didn't mean to close the issue. Probably should keep it open until this option is implemented.

[fwenzel]

Oh yeah, keep it open for sure :)

An about:config option is fine indeed, that's what I use for everything at the moment -- but it's not very user friendly.

[stephenjudge]

True it's not very user friendly, but for now it is better than nothing. On that point people need to get to the User Docs to learn how to use the about:config for these options, but at the moment you have to bounce through a number of websites to find the user docs. It might be useful to put a direct link to them on the Firefox Add-ons page. It would also be useful to put a link to the extension home page in the extension itself. So when a user clicks on the context menu of the extension the menu option for 'Visit Home Page' is active. Makes it all a bit easier navigating to the right pages.

[fwenzel]

I added a new setting, that defaults to 30 characters now.

The behavior is: If the site does not specify a short URL, then we send it to the shortening service regardless.

If the site specifies a URL that it considers short, then we send it to the shortening service if and only if it is longer than this threshold, which I arbitrarily set to 30 characters.

The functionality can be:

• disabled by setting the threshold to 0
• made to always kick in by setting it to less than 6 (because very URL has http:// in it).