For starters, in addition to building Twts, the small URL redirects, it will now post messages to Twitter. Here’s an example. As soon as the app is launched, I’ll ask Twitter to add the “from EduTwt” bit to the date line.

The Twitter API is easy to work with, and there are some very helpful classes out there that made the job even easier. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like to send a Tweet using EduTwt:

A few notes about that box there. First, you can store as many Twitter accounts as you like. If you manage multiple accounts, such as a general institution account as well as an account for another campus office, I think this may be helpful. Second, I’m building in the ability to automatically paste one of your saved EduTwts into the message.

A quick word about storing Twitter login information. Some people balk at services like EduTwt, HootSuite or TwitterFeed storing your login information, which I can totally understand. My plan is to not store Twitter account passwords, instead using Twitter’s new OAuth setup. For now though, I’m storing the login credentials of this particular user, a test account I setup, in a database.

I’ve also been putting a quick wrapper around the pages to make it look a little nicer and make it easier to jump around to the different services. Here’s a quick snap of the actual main content area on the home page. I’ve cropped out the header and footer for now because they are ugly.

Click for a larger version.

I’ll report back when I’ve got more to share.

I got to thinking it’d be useful to have some sort of social media tracking tool geared towards higher education. The idea kept bouncing around in my head until I finally bought a domain name, edutwt.com, and got started coding this evening.

I originally thought that it would just be useful for Twitter, but the more I thought about it and talked with other people today, I realized you could use these short urls to track all sorts of things: Facebook wall posts or fan updates, and even print. Why not slap a edutwt address on a postcard, poster or QR code.

I spent the evening figuring out how to generate codes, track them in a database and fighting with mod_rewrite (we’re not friends). I’ve also started work on some administrative tools. Here are some screen shots. Please keep in mind things are extremely rough.

Here’s the screen to create a new link. You can label your link to help you keep things organize. You can let EduTwt generate a unique code (right now it’s 4 characters, such as h2vs), or you can enter your own. Something I think is very useful is the ability to additionally tag each EduTwt with some Google Analytics code to further track visitors after they click on your link and go to your website. This is optional, of course.

I’ve also built a very simple display of all the EduTwts a particular user has set up. Thanks to jQuery, it’s all sortable. jQuery’s cool. From here, you can see stats on a particular EduTwt.

There are about a million things to do over the next few days:

• User Management
• Statistical Reporting
• Post Tweets to Twitter
• Pull in RSS Feed and auto-post to Twitter
• Build a nice looking website and logo

Needless to say, I’ll be busy. When I’m ready for some alpha testers, I’ll put the word out. You can follow @edutwt for more updates.