Much to my chagrin, the latest update of WordPress.com Stats (v. 1.63) broke the internal shortlink functionality in WordPress (ie. the wp.me links that accompany every new post). After I realized this was causing my post content not to display properly, I pulled the get_shortlink() function off of my site and thought about what I should do next. After a little Googling, I came upon David Walsh‘s excellent article on how to create short URLs using PHP and the bit.ly API. It basically told me everything I needed to know, but since the API had changed since he wrote his article, I modified the function to make it v3 compliant (it’s possible that the 2.01 API he was using still worked, but I didn’t actually check). You can find my new version of the function down below.


< ?php /* make a URL small */ function make_bitly_url($url,$login,$appkey,$format = 'xml',$history = 1) { //create the URL $bitly = 'http://api.bit.ly/v3/shorten?login='.$login.'&apiKey='.$appkey.'&uri='.urlencode($url). '&format='.$format.'&history='.$history; //get the url //could also use cURL here $response = file_get_contents($bitly); //parse depending on desired format if(strtolower($format) == 'json') { $json = @json_decode($response,true); return $json['data']['url']; } elseif(strtolower($format) == 'xml') //xml { $xml = simplexml_load_string($response); return $xml->data->url;
}
elseif(strtolower($format) == 'txt') //text
{
return $response;
}
}

?>


Because I wanted to use these short links on my blog in place of a “sharethis.com” widget, I added the make_bitly_url() function to my functions.php file and the following code to my Index Template (index.php) and my Single Post Template (single.php):


< ?php $the_title = get_the_title(get_the_ID()); ?>
< ?php $the_permalink = get_permalink(get_the_ID()); ?>
< ?php $bitly_link = make_bitly_url($the_permalink,'YOUR LOGIN','YOUR API KEY','xml'); ?>