Why we don’t have a Twitter characters counter

Why we don’t have a Twitter characters counter

Why there is no character counter for Twitter? Please add it, it should be easy.

It’s not that simple. Actually such counter is impossible to implement. Some parts of the message could be processed only after the blogpost is already published which makes it impossible to count characters at the time of writing.

Calculating number of characters for Twitter itself is not a problem. It’s it’s hard, it requires a very big JavaScript, but it’s possible.

The problem is in WordPress. WordPress is too powerful and has too many possibilities.

Here is an example.

Message format: %TITLE% – %URL% %CF-PRICE% %HTAGS% %HCATS% %HCT-PRDTAGS% – %EXCERPT%.

How to calculate number of characters?

Both %TITLE% and %EXCERPT% support HTML and shortcodes. There are also content filters that applied by WordPress and third party plugins. Some of those plugins apply their filters ONLY on the “view” action.

Example (title from the actual live website):

I just watched the movie “[movie-title-id-166]” – it was {great|awesome|hilarious|enjoyable}

How many characters here?

Once published this title could be:

I just watched the movie “The Imitation Game” – it was great‘ – 61 characters
I just watched the movie “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water” – it was awesome‘ – 68 characters

So how to get number of characters from %TITLE% and %EXCERPT%? You need to run a very extensive ajax call that will save the post draft and generate the view. People would want a “live” counter, so this ajax should be executed on each press of the button. That will degrade performance and still be slow. Oh and it could bring the wrong results, since it could save draft with “great” and publish the final post with “awesome”.

Next problem – WordPress does not save the tags along with draft. So we need a JavaScript that will scan tags. Even worse problem – custom taxonomies. We need a JavaScript that will analyze the DOM and find custom taxonomies in it.

And finally we came to the “impossible” part – %CF-PRICE%. This field is added by some plugin that has a very nice form for inserting the price of some custom product attached to the blogpost. There is no way to detect or parse this form since every plugin does it in it’s own unique way. This value can be obtained ONLY from the published post – there is no way to get it from the draft or from the interface.

Also let’s not forget custom post types. Those could have their own interface for everything including title and tags. How to get info from them?

The bottom line – the correct number of characters can be calculated only from the already published post. There is no way to get it on the fly.

Tutorials

How SNAP Sets Images

How SNAP Sets Images

All types of posts for Facebook, Google+, XING

All types of posts for Facebook, Google+, XING

How to format Facebook post with attached link

How to format Facebook post with attached link

All types of Facebook posts

How to format Facebook post with attached link

All types of posts to Facebook with video

All types of posts to Facebook with video

Why we don’t have a Twitter characters counter

Why we don’t have a Twitter characters counter.

Plugin Setup/Installation

All types of posts to Facebook with video

SNAP PRO Plugin Upgrade/Activation

All types of posts to Facebook with video

WP-Cron: Scheduling Tasks in WordPress

WP-Cron: Scheduling Tasks in WordPress

All Supported Networks

All types of posts to Facebook with video

How to check if curlSSL is working

WP-Cron: Scheduling Tasks in WordPress

How to completely remove SNAP

WP-Cron: Scheduling Tasks in WordPress

SNAP Features

Accounts

Most Major Social Networks are supported.

Settings

SNAP has a lot of settings to configure.

Powerful Filters

Set what posts go to each network based on categories, tags, type, format and many more criteria.

Limit Autoposting Speed

Importing many posts at once? Not a problem. SNAP can query your autoposts and publish them one by one in defined time intervals.

Custom URLs for AutoPosts

You can set a custom URL for the link shared by SNAP
l

Autopost New Blogposts

SNAP will automatically post your newly published blogposts (pages, events, products, custom post types) to all your defined social media accounts.

Quick Post

Send a quick post to all configured social networks without creating a WordPress blogpost.

"Spin" message post templates

Automatically change/alter the words or sentences in your social media posts 

Emoji Support

Emoji Support
+

Export/Import Plugin settings

You Export and Import all plugin settings as backup or to move it to another site

Format your posts

Format your posts using flexible replacement tags. make text posts, share links, or post images.

Hashtags

SNAP can post tags, categories and any other custom WordPress taxonomies as Hashtags

Additional URL Parameters

Add additional parameters to the links posted by SNAP.

URL Shorteners

URL Shorteners: bit.ly, is.gd, Rebrandly, YOURLS and built in WordPress URL Shortener

See what was posted

You can see the direct links to the posts published by SNAP on the "Post Edit" page

SNAP Pro for Wordpress

Pro version upgrade adds the ability to configure more than one account for each social network and some additional features.

Get SNAP Pro

Latest Blogposts

Corrupted cache issue with SNAP Pro.

Corrupted cache issue with SNAP Pro.

What happened? SNAP Pro is checking for API update every 6 hours. Today (May 22, 2019) around 6:30PM EST Google Cloud messed our update server for about 7 minutes. A bunch of "lucky" sites that were checking for update during those 7 minutes got their plugin cache...

Support for “Google My Business” is coming soon…

Support for “Google My Business” is coming soon…

Support for "Google My Business" is coming this fall. Google recently made some kind of blog-a-like functionality available for local business listings. As a local business owner you can add posts, events, offers as well as products to your business listing. Although...

Facebook app review

Facebook app review

We are getting a lot of questions about upcoming deadline for Facebook app review. People are asking what should we do. The honest answer would be: "No one has any idea". We submitted several apps for Facebook review using different ways of describing and explaining...

What happened with Facebook

What happened with Facebook

What happened with Facebook? Facebook made changes to it's API access policy on May 1st, 2018. As the result we introduced our own Premium API for Facebook.  We feel that we need to explain how exactly those changes affected SNAP. Since the beginning Facebook native...

Instagram issues

Instagram issues

Instagram made some very big changes to authentication process. About 70% of our users are affected by them. Before the changes the process was quite simple: Sometimes Instagram decided that login from SNAP is "unusual" and asked for confirmation. You just had to open...

SNAP for Wordpress

SNAP for Wordpress

SNAP for Wordpress MultiUser

SNAP for Wordpress MultiUser

SNAP API

SNAP API