The Simple Twitter Link plugin has been updated.

First, and foremost, you can now pass various options to the URL shortening options. Secondly, a workaround is in place for a reported, known error.

Today I’ve had reported to me that one of my plugins (Simple Twitter Link – but I’m sure this equally occur in others) is generating the error “cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode”. In fact, it generates it about 200 times.

The problem? Well, it’s a bug in version 4 of PHP, so there’s not much I can do about it (sorry!). It’s fixed in PHP 5, though.

One suggested solution is to force your server to use PHP 5 – many have version 5 installed, but just not set as the default. To do this simply put AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php in the first line of your .htaccess file.

I use html_entity_decode for the post title. At the moment I do this whether you ask for the title or not – I’ll make a change for the future to ONLY do this if requested. That way you can omit the title to prevent this error from occurring. This will definitely also affect Simple Social Bookmarks and Simple Facebook Link.

I’ve updated Simple Twitter Link and, only recently launched, Simple Twitter Data.

Simple Twitter Link now uses Simple URL Shortener and there’s also an option to override the default URL.

Simple Twitter Data now has a second function, which will pass the number of references to a URL on Twitter.

All 3 of my Wordpress social bookmarking plugins have now been updated – Simple Social Bookmarks, Simple Twitter Link and Simple Facebook Link.

In fact, all 3 have had the same changes applied…

1. I’ve fixed a bug where certain characters (e.g. an ampersand) within the blog title can cause problems with the resultant link.
2. I’ve added su.pr as a URL shortening service.

Version 1.3 of the Simple Twitter Link plugin has been launched!

This update adds bit.ly to the list of URL shortening services that the plugin can make use of. Thanks to Helgi Hrafn Halldórsson for the suggestion.

Full details can be found on the plugin’s dedicated page.