A long time ago I wrote a plug-in for Live Writer that did a Windows Live Search for you and let you paste the results. I won’t bang on about it too much here as I wrote it up at the time and it’s preserved for eternity here.
I use this a lot in Live Writer but, increasingly, I don’t want to paste the actual URLs that come back from a search. What I want to insert is a shortened URL from Bit.ly. There’s a plug-in for doing that but I wanted to combine the Bit.ly service with my search dialog so I’ve updated it.
In essence, you’re writing a blog post and you want to search for jellyfish so you go ahead and run my plug-in;
and it springs up a Windows Forms 2.0 dialog where you can type in the search term ( it remembers them );
and it goes off and grabs results ( top 10 if I remember correctly ) and then you can select one of those and right mouse on it to shorten it with Bit.ly;
and another dialog bobs up ( sorry, short of time 🙂 );
and clicking Shorten makes the REST call to Bit.ly and shortens the URL and takes you back to the previous screen;
and then if you click and hover over the title of the link;
you can change the title of the link before it gets pasted in just like it did below;
The bits are still .NET 2.0 – I used Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2’s multi-targeting support in order to make that work and it worked a treat and they’re still in the same place for download as they were originally.
Mike Taulty 