Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Hacking bit.ly URL Creator Firefox Add-On To Work With Firefox 3.5

Now that I am using Twitter a lot, I wanted a handy way to create bit.ly links inside Firefox, but the bit.ly add-on only supports Firefox 3.0.x and you cannot add it if you are running Firefox 3.5.  So, I just hacked it up and it is working fine now with Firefox 3.5.3.  To do this:

  1. Go to this page: http://mac.softpedia.com/progDownload/Bit-ly-Creator-Download-38693.html
  2. Right-click on one of the mirrored download locations and choose “Save Link As” and save the bit.ly_creator-0.1-fx.xpi file somewhere to your hard drive.
  3. Open the saved bit.ly_creator-0.1-fx.xpi file with a zip file utility and extract the install.rdf file.
  4. Open the install.rdf file in a text editor and edit the em:maxVersion attribute by changing 3.0.* to 3.*, and save the file
  5. Reinsert the install.rdf file into the bit.ly_creator-0.1-fx.xpi file with your zip utility, and make sure that there is only one install.rdf file in there and that it is the correctly-edited one.
  6. In Firefox go to File/Open File and point to the bit.ly_creator-0.1-fx.xpi file, which will cause Firefox to install the add-on and then restart Firefox…you are done!

To use the add-on, just right-click on a link or page and choose the appropriate bit.ly option from the context menu.  The URL will be saved to your clipboard and can be pasted wherever you like.  SWEET!  cool smile

Posted by dfunkt Avatar for {name} on 09/16 at 11:03 AM
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