Making things shorter than they really are might be rather good fun (just look at what Newsnight did to little Hazel Blears above), but it’s also rather useful for text-limited things like Twitter.

Using bit.ly or tinyurl or j.mp or other thinks like that are all just fine, but you’re putting your links at risk; since you don’t control where those links go. tr.im announced earlier this year that they were going to close down; Digg changed their short links to go to different places depending whether you were signed in to Digg or not; and doubtless we’re all waiting for another provider of a shortlink service to fall over and die as well, or replace all your links with spam.

I’ve been using my own shortlink service, at muk.fm, for a while now; and have just added a Tweetie2 compatible API to it – and open-sourced the code.

You’ll find my code by using my link-shortener to get there: it’s at http://muk.fm/4l9.

Feedback is welcome, of course; but feel free to use it as you see fit.

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Tags: bit.ly, code, j.mp, links, php, short, shorten, tr.im | Permalink | Comments RSS