Short URL is commonly used today for several reasons: avoid url garbling, take smallest space especially for long url which need to be posted at limited space format eg: twitter, also often used to manipulate user for specific purposes eg: hiding orginal url for phising and ads/affiliation links.

There are many websites that provide shortening url services, tinyurl, bit.ly, hex.io are some of them, below is simple PHP script as an implementation to use their API, create short url on the fly, currently support: tinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, tr.im and hex.io, but you can easily add other providers.

PHP Class

<?php
/*
** Title: Shortening URL Class
** Author: chazzuka <ariel@chazzuka.com>
** Author URL: http://www.chazzuka.com
** Latest Updated: September 24 2009
*/
class ShortUrl {

	public static function create($url,$provider='tinyurl',$user='',$key='') {
		$api_url = sprintf(self::api($provider),urlencode($url),$user,$key);
		return self::inspect($provider,self::execute($api_url));
	}

	private static function execute($url) {
		$ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
		curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
		$text = curl_exec($ch);
		curl_close($ch);
		return $text;
	}

	private static function inspect($provider,$xml) {
		if(!empty($xml)) {
			switch(strtolower(trim($provider))){
				case "bitly":
					$o = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
					return (string)$o->results->nodeKeyVal->shortUrl;
					break;
				case "trim":
					$o = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
					return (string)$o->url;
					break;
				case "isgd":
				case "hexio":
				default:
					return $xml;
			}
		}
		return false;
	}

	private static function api($provider) {
		switch(strtolower(trim($provider))){
			case "bitly":
				$return = "http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&format=xml&longUrl=%s&login=%s&apiKey=%s";
				break;
			case "isgd":
				$return = "http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=%s";
				break;
			case "hexio":
				$return = "http://hex.io/api-create.php?url=%s";
				break;
			case "digg":
				$return = "http://services.digg.com/url/short/create?url=%s&appkey=%s&type=xml";
				break;
			case "trim":
				$return = "http://api.tr.im/v1/trim_url.xml?url=%s";
				break;
			default:
				$return = "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=%s";
		}
		return $return;
	}
}
?>

Sample of usage:

<?php
$url = 'http://www.chazzuka.com/blog/?p=192';
echo ShortUrl::create($url,'trim');
echo '<hr />';
echo ShortUrl::create($url,'tinyurl');
echo '<hr />';
echo ShortUrl::create($url,'isgd');
echo '<hr />';
echo ShortUrl::create($url,'hexio');
echo '<hr />';
echo ShortUrl::create($url,'bitly','your_user_name','your_api_key');
?>

I had signup with plurk a year ago but haven’t “plurking” since i use twitter a lot, and for me both of them were created for same purpose, microblogging, sharing what you’re up to in few sentences and follow what your friends up to. Today i had re-theming my personal blog and use free seven five wordpress theme by press75 which is very simple and already integrated with twitter status, delicious bookmarks, and external RSS feed, then i thinks its good to add plurk also.

Theres a wordpress plugin to achieve this purpose already, but here i only need to fetch status update, and dont need any widget or possibility to update my status from my blog, and here we go,

// fetch plurk messages
function plurk_messages(
$username = '',
$num = 1,
$list = true,
$show_username = false,
$show_moods = true,
$encode_utf8 = false)
{
$plurk_url = 'http://www.plurk.com';

$plurk_moods = array('loves','likes','shares','gives','hates','wants','wishes','needs','will','hopes','asks','has','was','wonders','feels','thinks','says','is');
array_walk($plurk_moods, 'plurk_addspace');

$plurk_mood_replace = array();
$plurk_mood_replacer = array();

include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');

$messages = fetch_rss('http://www.plurk.com/user/' . $username . '.xml');

if ($list) echo '<ul class="plurk">';

if ($username == '')
{
if ($list) echo '<li>';
echo 'RSS not configured';
if ($list) echo '</li>';
}
else
{
if ( empty($messages->items) )
{
if ($list) echo '<li>';
echo 'No public plurk messages.';
if ($list) echo '</li>';
}
else
{
// start fetching
$i = 0;
foreach ( $messages->items as $message )
{
$msg = $message['atom_content'];
$author_name = $message['author_name'];
$link = $plurk_url.$message['link_'];
$time = strtotime($message['published']);

if(!$show_moods) { $msg = str_replace($plurk_moods,'',$msg); }
else {
if(empty($plurk_mood_replace)||empty($plurk_moods_replacer)){
list($plurk_mood_replace,$plurk_mood_replacer) = plurk_moods_format($plurk_moods,$author_name);
}
$msg = str_replace($plurk_mood_replace,$plurk_mood_replacer,$msg);
}

if(!$show_username) { $msg = str_replace($author_name.' ','',$msg); }
else { $msg = str_replace($author_name,'<a class="plurk_username" href="'.$plurk_url.'/'.$username.'">'.$author_name.'</a>',$msg); }

if($encode_utf8) $msg = utf8_encode($msg);

if ($list) { echo '<li class="plurk-item">'; } else { echo '<p class="plurk-message">'; }

$msg = preg_replace("/<a href=[\"' ]?([^\"' >]+)[\"' ]?[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/i",'$1',$msg);
$msg = plurk_hyperlinks($msg);
$msg = plurk_users($msg);

echo $msg;

if ( ( abs( time() - $time) ) < 86400 ) {  $h_time = sprintf( __('%s ago'), human_time_diff( $time ) ); }
else{ $h_time = date(__('Y/m/d'), $time); }

echo '<span class="plurk-timestamp"><abbr title="' . date(__('Y/m/d H:i:s'), $time) . '">' . $h_time . '</abbr></span>';

if ($list) { echo '</li>'; } else { echo '</p>'; }

$i++;
if ( $i >= $num ) break;
}
// end fetching -->
}
}
if ($list) echo '</ul>';
}
// set pattern + replacement for message prefix (says, is etc.)
function plurk_moods_format($plurk_moods,$user){
$plurk_moods_replace = $plurk_moods_replacer = array();
foreach($plurk_moods as $mood){
$plurk_moods_replace[] = "$user $mood";
$plurk_moods_replacer[] = $user.' <span class="plurk-'.trim($mood).'">'.trim($mood).'</span> ';
}
return array($plurk_moods_replace,$plurk_moods_replacer);
}
// add spaces into moods
function plurk_addspace(&$item,$key) { $item = "$item "; }

And couple of functions below taken from Twitter for Wordpress plugin by Ricardo Gonzalez to format autolink and in-reply message.

// format autolink
function plurk_hyperlinks($text) {
// Props to Allen Shaw & webmancers.com
// match protocol://address/path/file.extension?some=variable&another=asf%
//$text = preg_replace("/\b([a-zA-Z]+:\/\/[a-z][a-z0-9\_\.\-]*[a-z]{2,6}[a-zA-Z0-9\/\*\-\?\&\%]*)\b/i","<a href=\"$1\" class=\"plurk-link\">$1</a>", $text);
$text = preg_replace('/\b([a-zA-Z]+:\/\/[\w_.\-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6}[\/\w\-~.?=&%#+$*!]*)\b/i',"<a href=\"$1\" class=\"plurk-link\">$1</a>", $text);
// match www.something.domain/path/file.extension?some=variable&another=asf%
//$text = preg_replace("/\b(www\.[a-z][a-z0-9\_\.\-]*[a-z]{2,6}[a-zA-Z0-9\/\*\-\?\&\%]*)\b/i","<a href=\"http://$1\" class=\"plurk-link\">$1</a>", $text);
$text = preg_replace('/\b(?<!:\/\/)(www\.[\w_.\-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6}[\/\w\-~.?=&%#+$*!]*)\b/i',"<a href=\"http://$1\" class=\"plurk-link\">$1</a>", $text);

// match name@address
$text = preg_replace("/\b([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9\_\.\-]*[a-zA-Z]*\@[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9\_\.\-]*[a-zA-Z]{2,6})\b/i","<a href=\"mailto://$1\" class=\"plurk-link\">$1</a>", $text);
//mach #trendingtopics. Props to Michael Voigt
$text = preg_replace('/([\.|\,|\:|\¡|\¿|\>|\{|\(]?)#{1}(\w*)([\.|\,|\:|\!|\?|\>|\}|\)]?)\s/i', "$1<a href=\"http://plurk.com/#search?q=$2\" class=\"plurk-link\">#$2</a>$3 ", $text);
return $text;
}
// in-reply to
function plurk_users($text) {
$text = preg_replace('/([\.|\,|\:|\¡|\¿|\>|\{|\(]?)@{1}(\w*)([\.|\,|\:|\!|\?|\>|\}|\)]?)\s/i', "$1<a href=\"http://plurk.com/$2\" class=\"plurk-user\">@$2</a>$3 ", $text);
return $text;
}

Copy those functions in your functions.php at your active theme folder, or you can put it in separate file then include it in your functions.php file.

The implementation is simple, just call the function in your file where you need your plurk status to be placed.

plurk_messages('username',10) ;

The function tahe few parameters in sequential order as follow:

1. Username
2. Number of status to be displayed
3. Flag true/false Use unordinal list or note (ul li or p)
4. Flag true/false show your username in the message
5. Flag true/false show the message prefix or not
6. Flag true/false Encode the message in UTF8 or not

How to styling? you need to add CSS for few class of the HTML tag which are auto generated by the function

ul.plurk, li.plurk-item. p.plurk-message, a.plurk_username, span.plurk-timestamp, a.plurk-link, a.pluk-user, also series of span with classes prefix by plurk- and followed by message prefix eg: span.plurk-says, span.plurk-loves etc.

Do you plurking? add me!

Thas it, hopely it usefull for you.