Tag Archives: bitly

26 May
2015

Recover Bitly Bundle Data

For some years I’ve been creating a bundle of links covering articles I recommend for various topics in the Zend Certified Engineer Exam (if you can here looking for the bundle itself, it’s at http://lornajane.net/zce-links-collection). This was done using bitly’s bundles feature, which I thought was a great way to share links. In fact I had 10-15 bundles that I had created from collating all the links in a particular training course or talk, so that people didn’t have to try to write down URLs as I went along. Unfortunately they sunset their bundles and then removed them completely, and I missed the announcement (it all happened quite quickly, they’d seen some abuse of the feature, it’s free, all totally reasonable) BUT they also didn’t respond to my support questions about how to recover the data.

It turns out, it’s an undocumented feature on their API, so here is everything I know about recovering your bundle data, including the script I used to rescue my own data. Continue reading →

18 Jun
2012

Bit.ly API: Bundles and Short URLs

I am a huge fan of bit.ly and use their tools for a wide variety of different things. They recently did a big relaunch with some lovely new features, which are for the most part pretty good, but which are inaccessible in places. In particular, it seems that there aren’t any short URLs for the bundles – which is annoying for me as I use that feature a lot!

To get around this, I used their API to make a page which lists my bit.ly bundles, and creates shortlinks for each of them (once you’ve created a shortlink for a given URL once, bit.ly just re-uses the same ones the next time you ask to shorten the same URL, so this is less silly than it sounds).

In case the code is helpful, I thought I’d share. Continue reading →

28 Jul
2011

Shortening URLs from PHP with Bit.ly

I’ve been looking around for a really simple API that would be a nice place to get started using web services from PHP – and I realised that bit.ly actually fits the bill really well. They have straightforward api docs on google code, and it’s also a pretty simple function!

Here’s a simple example, using PHP’s curl extension, of using the bit.ly API to get a short URL, using PHP (you need an API key, but if you’re a registered bit.ly user, you can log in and then find yours at http://bitly.com/a/your_api_key).

$ch = curl_init('http://api.bitly.com/v3/shorten?login=username&apiKey=R_secret&longUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flornajane.net');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
print_r(json_decode($result));

Continue reading →