Bit.ly is marvellous. Here's a short function that I've written to automatically shorten links, which I needed for Media UK. You'll need to register with bit.ly and get your api key - it's free and only takes a moment.
Alternatively, I've now written my code to make your own shortlinks server.
// Use it like so
if ($shortlink=get_short_link("http://www.cnn.com/"))
echo $shortlink;
} else {
die("There's been a grave error");
}
// And here's the function
function get_short_link($url) {
// http://james.cridland.net/code
// v0.2 24 May 08: added a URLdecode function, to correctly cope with some charactersets
// thanks to Nick at www.japansoc.com
$bitly_login="yourloginname";
$bitly_apikey="yourapikey";
$api_call = file_get_contents("http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=".$url."&login=".$bitly_login."&apiKey=".$bitly_apikey);
$bitlyinfo=json_decode(utf8_encode($api_call),true);
if ($bitlyinfo['errorCode']==0) {
return $bitlyinfo['results'][urldecode($url)]['shortUrl'];
} else {
return false;
}
}
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