Chris Shiflett, in working on a new, cleaner and leaner version of his site, shiflett.org, has come across a few "PHP tidbits" that he shares in his latest entry.

Just for fun, I'd like to share a couple of quick PHP tidbits with you that I wrote instead of starting on the real project at hand.

This post is the first of them, demonstrating two things . The first of which how you can make a useful tool with the SimpleXML functionality of PHP 5 and a REST API (like his example from Feedburner). His example grabs the statistics from the Feedburner API and pulls out the circulation number with two lines of code.

The second bit of functionality he shares is a quick function for shortening URLs to make them a bit easier to manage. It insets the ellipsis into the middle of the long URL to make it easier to squeeze into that layout.