Generate A Tiny URL On The Fly With PHP
Uniform resource locators (URL) are starting to get very long and I’m getting sick of typing ridiculously long strings into safari on my iphone. I don’t really care about the extra bandwidth, It’s just annoying when you’re on the phone telling someone to go check out a 67 character long url and they mistype it three times.
I’ve just started using the tiny url service and so far it’s been useful. On one of my sites I wanted to generate a tiny url for each of my pages to make them quicker to type in and also so people don’t know what get variables I’ve set until they get there. Here is the PHP function that I used to generate a tiny url for every page on the site.
There doesn’t seem to be any documentation at all on the Tiny URL website about this so I’m not sure if it’ll change in the future.
This function passes your desired url to the api-create.php script on the tinyurl domain which returns a nice short url that isn’t a pain to put into your iphone.
function get_tiny_url($url)
{
$new_url = file_get_contents('http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url);
return $new_url;
}
$tiny_url = get_tiny_url("http://codytaylor.org");
Not much to it but it made my life easier.
