In this new post today Raphael Stolt shows how to use the Zend_Http_Client component of the Zend Framework to "tinyize" a URL.

In a recent blog post Dave Marshall outlined a quick workaround for tweeting via the Zend_Http_Client component which is a reasonable approach for calling services that aren't in the Zend Framework core yet like Zend_Service_Twitter or are not supported out of the box. Therefore this post will try to describe a Zend Framework way of creating tinyized URLs.

He creates a UrlShorterner interface containing a shortenize() method that automates sending a URL over to the tinyurl.com web service and returning the results.

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.

Ryan Malesevich is back on his blog today with a look at another WordPress plugin - WP-Chunk, a tool to split up large data so to conforms more to the page layout.

Occassionally I'll have someone post a comment that includes a URL. Wordpress automatically links to that URL, but often times it's too large for the alotted space. So depending on the browser, it might break it entirely. John recently wrote about a plugin that would fix that problem. WP-Chunk doesn't require much to work. There's no customization, or settings to change, it just works.

His example is of a long URL, but I imagine you could use it for any content that would cause the output of the post to expand out too far. And no configuration makes it even better!