URL shortening services are a must if microblogging services like Twitter are to work. In 140 characters, you don't want the URL you're linking to eating up 100 of them. Or worse, it might not even fit. Enter TinyURL, and a bunch of other services that give you a shorter custom URL pointing to the target site. But why not roll your own, using Phurl? Let's do it!

The tutorial walks you through the installation (quick and easy thanks to a graphical installer) and some usage examples (with screenshots). A few other things - like branding and allowing multiple URLs - are suggested as future enhancements.

In a recent blog post Dave Marshall outlined a quick workaround for tweeting via the Zend_Http_Client component which is a reasonable approach for calling services that aren't in the Zend Framework core yet like Zend_Service_Twitter or are not supported out of the box. Therefore this post will try to describe a Zend Framework way of creating tinyized URLs.

He creates a UrlShorterner interface containing a shortenize() method that automates sending a URL over to the tinyurl.com web service and returning the results.