“Twitter Blog: Pushing Our (Tweet) Button”

You can very easily transform their branded button into a “Post to Twitter” bookmarklet for you to use anywhere, and it’s silly that they didn’t think to publicize that fact (but then, geeks haven’t been their main target for a while). I’d been looking for an official bookmarklet for a while now, one that wouldn’t need to go through third-party servers, especially since I’ve gotten my iPad: having to copy and paste URLs is a pain when hitting a bookmarklet should work just as well.

So here’s the bookmarklet (which you could conceivably extend to populate the tweet with selected text when appropriate, but I don’t care, and I don’t mind using copy-and-paste for that):

javascript:window.location='http://twitter.com/share?text='+ encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&url='+ encodeURIComponent(window.location);

If you don’t see anything above, that’ll be because I put it in a textarea so it could easily be copied and pasted on the iPad. You can also drag this link to your bookmarks bar if you’re on a platform that provides such elaborate functionality. (You’d think maybe someday iOS would let users create bookmarklets without jumping through so many hoops?)