TinyURL is an awesome service. For those who don’t know what TinyURL is, TinyURL allows you to convert your long URLs like “http://www.akchauhan.com/category/jquery/” to small URLs like “http://tinyurl.com/yz4c4ba”. Basically you need such type of service when you are posting your data to some third party web service and there is limit on the number of characters you can post like Twitter. Twitter only allow 140 characters long Tweet.

Using the PHP and TinyURL API, you can create these tiny URLs.

function get_tiny_url($url)  
{  
	$ch = curl_init();  
	$timeout = 5;  
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url);  
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);  
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);  
	$data = curl_exec($ch);  
	curl_close($ch);  
 
	return $data;  
}
 
//test it out!
$new_url = get_tiny_url('http://www.akchauhan.com/category/jquery/');
 
//returns http://tinyurl.com/yz4c4ba
echo $new_url;