New Bit.ly Class to use with CakePHP or by it self

Submitted by Derick Ng on 7 August 2009 - 7:53am

If you use service like Twitter where you only get a limited number of characters to post or if you are just sick of dealing with unruly long urls you might be familliar with url shortening services such as Bit.ly.

I personally like them because of they offer a nice API and statistics all for free. It is a pretty quick service too. You can generate hundreds of URLs in just a few seconds. All you have to do is register and you get a username and API key which you will need in the following section.

Here is the code … As you can see I only implemented the shorten for now but I will probably add some of the other stuff later. For some reason WP won’t let me post curl_exec( so be sure to remove the extra character.

class bitly {
	/**
	 * A PHP class to utilize the bitly API
	 * through the Bitly API. Handles:
	 * - Shorten
	 *
	 * Requires PHP5, CURL, JSON and a Bitly account http://bit.ly/
	 *
	 * Bitly API documentation: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
	 */
 
	protected $appkey;
	protected $login;
	protected $version;
 
	/**
	* Contruct the Bitly Class
	*
    * @param string, your Bitly account key
    * @param string, your Bitly account login
	*/
	public function __construct($login, $appkey, $version='2.0.1') {
		$this->login = $login;
		$this->appkey = $appkey;
		$this->version = $version;
	}
 
	/**
	* Retrieve a shortened URL
	*
    * @param string, url to shorten
    * @param string, version of Bitly to use
	*/
	public function shorten($url) {
		//create the URL
		$api_url = 'http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version='.$this->version.'&longUrl='.urlencode($url).'&format=xml&login='.$this->login.'&apiKey='.$this->appkey;
		//call the API
		$curl = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		$response = curl_ex_ec($curl);
		curl_close($curl);
 
		//parse the XML response and return the url
		$xml_object = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
		return $xml_object->results->nodeKeyVal->shortUrl;
	}
 
}

If you want to use this in CakePHP … you will want to do something like this.
Put this line before the class … I actually use this in a helper since this is a view level class

App::import('Vendor','Bitly', array("file" => "bitly/bitly.class.php"));

Now you can just invoke it in one of your functions somewhere with two simple calls!

$bitly = new Bitly('username', 'your_API_key_here');
$short_url = $bitly->shorten($long_url);

Simple as that … oh and one more thing. Be sure to have CURL installed else this won’t work.