Lorna Mitchell has a quick post to her blog today showing how you can use a simple curl call from PHP to shorten urls with bit.ly and pull back the result.

I've been looking around for a really simple API that would be a nice place to get started using web services from PHP - and I realised that bit.ly actually fits the bill really well. They have straightforward api docs on google code, and it's also a pretty simple function!

Her code is about three lines consisting of a curl_init call to the bit.ly server with the URL, a curl_setopt to tell it to return the information and a curl_exec to execute. The result is a JSON string easily decoded with a "url" parameter containing the newly minted short URL. She also briefly mentions some of the other features of the bit.ly API including reverse translation and bundling of links.

This past weekend there was quite a bit of discussion around the "rev=canonical" proposal (see here) and how, despite the advantages (URL shortening) it seems to have there are still some downsides to be considered. Here's what some of the PHP community have been saying:

• Ben Ramsey:
  • A rev='"canonical'" Rebuttal
  • Summarizing My rev='"canonical'" Argument
  • Specifying rev='"canonical'" With HTTP
• Chris Shiflett:
  • Save the Internet with rev="canonical"
  • A rev="canonical" HTTP Header
• Marco Tabini: Rev=Canonical madness
• Evert Pot: rev="canonical" and url shortening
• Rob Allen: Shorter Link: A rev=canonical WordPress plugin
• Lukas Smith: rev=canonical
• Paul Reinheimer: rev="canonical" is moving too fast.
• Dave Marshall: Rev=Canonical and all that Jazz