TwitterTools plugin publishing tweets without URL

I have TwitterTools plugin to tweet my new blog posts to my twitter account. Recently I noticed that my tweets from TwitterTools plugin do not have the URL to my posts. I checked my plugin settings and everything looked OK.

I thought may be I have wrong user id and API key for my bit.ly account so I checked the user id and the account key and that combination appeared to be correct. I tried disabling and then re-enabling the plugin but that did not help. I was inclined to blame the plugin developer for this bug but being a software developer I strongly believe in user error scenario so I decided to double check the settings that require user input.

In the plugin settings you need to provide

  • your Twitter id and password
  • bit.ly username and API key.

My Twitter account information was correct since the plugin was able to post my tweets.

Next I checked my bit.ly settings and guess what I found. A space at the end of my bit.ly API key! Although to naked eye the API key looked OK, however on close examination I found an empty space at the end. That empty space was causing a failed authentication on bit.ly side hence there was no URL in the tweets. I removed the empty space and now everything is peachy.

If you are also facing the same problem with TwitterTools plugin make sure there is no extra space in your bit.ly API key.

Good luck!