Add Retweet Links to Your Blog Entries in Moveable Type

I've quickly written up some javascript MT code that does 75% of what Amy's doing manually -- it generates the appropriate link to Twitter, with the title of the post and the link URL properly escaped. It <i>does not</i> shorten the link the way that Amy proposes doing, nor does it allow you to track clicks on ths link. Twitter will automatically shorten URLs entered directly into its web page, so don't worry about your links being too long when users get sent there - the retweet will still work. (If anyone knows of a URL shortening service that has a Javascript-accessible API and click tracking, let me know.) Also, to get this automated, you'll have to add it to your blog's entry template, and substitute the appropriate variables (I've put in the right ones for Moveable Type, which I use.)

I'm considering coming up with a server-supported solution that will implement that last 25% and doesn't require you to have access to templates on your weblog, but in the meantime, here's the javascript code you need to add to your blog entries each have a retweet link.

(And of course, if you find this useful, retweet it!)

Updated March 13, 2009:
I've removed the use of the javascript function to encode the Retweet link and instead used Moveable Type's encode_url tag output modifier. This protects against entry titles with an apostrophe that would prematurely end the string being fed to escape(). The downside is that if you're adopting this code to Wordpress or another CMS, you'll have to look up how to modify your tag output to ensure properly escaped title text. Pretty much any mainstream CMS will have support for this; at worse, you can still use an escape() command in the javascript and just make sure not to use apostrophes in your title texts (or escape them manually.)

Remember to replace @USERNAME with your Twitter username.

<!-- Retweet link from http://karlo.org/ -->
<a href=\"http://twitter.com/home?status=RT%20@USERNAME%20<$MTEntryTitle encode_url="1"$>%20<$MTEntryPermalink encode_url="1"$>">Retweet</a>
<!-- End Retweet link script -->

For ease, here's a Pastie of the same.

Here's the previous Javascript version in case it's useful to anyone; it may be useful as a template if your CMS doesn't support escaping tag outputs or you want to otherwise pre-process the link:

<!-- Retweet link script from http://karlo.org/ -->
<script language="Javascript"> 
  document.write('<a href=\"http://twitter.com/home?status=' 
  + escape('RT @USERNAME <$MTEntryTitle$> ')
  + escape('<$MTEntryPermalink$>')
  + '\">Retweet</a>');
</script>
<!-- End Retweet link script -->

For those of you wondering: yes, I feel silly for not figuring out the non-Javascript version of this the first time I looked at it. Such is life... I couldn't let it stop me from posting the newer, non-JS version here since it seems like this topic has been of interest to a good number of folks. Sometimes the solution you come to first just isn't optimal.