Keep it shortenTweet
Behold… shortenTweet! It’s a wee microapp for Twitter that tries to shorten your tweets using UTF-8, ASCII and some shorthand. It’s a combination of Sinatra + jQuery, and after doing this I’m all aboard this microapp train (esp. with how easy it is to deploy Rack-based apps on Passenger).
And — par for the course — after I “launched” it, I discovered 2 or 3 or services that already did “tweet shortening” (although I don’t think any of them actually employ UTF-8).