Further to my previous post about augmented reality and Layar, I have developed a small Layar for the Donabate and Portrane area. It basically will list all the business and tourist spots in the area. Pending approval I will be putting the remaining number of businesses and highlights of the area on to the layar with a view to having a Google map submission tool on a subpage of yamdablam.com in the very near future. So for those residents of the peninsula who have a GPS enabled smart phone, you’ll be able to view Donabate and Portrane area like never before.

So, fingers crossed the good people of Layar in Amsterdam approve the new layar for the area!

A nice feature to have on a site would be that of a URL shortener. I’ve looked at some of the more popular ones and decided to play with the API of the most popular, http://bit.ly.

I selected bit.ly as it is the most widely used, your account can be integrated with your Twitter client (Twitter for iPhone for example) and most impressively, you can get real time statistics on the shortened URL’s you create. This would be very useful for those companies who wish to track their marketing campaigns running on their website/twitter/Facebook accounts.

In the spirit of exploration, I’ve created a simple PHP bit.ly class, called bitlyApi.class.php.

To get up and running with this, I first created a new bit.ly account and copied out the API key they provide. Once you create an account, you will have access to the realtime statistics feature, otherwise you’ll just get the bog standard URL shortener service.

The bit.ly API is really straight forward. Have a look at the previous link to see what you can do.

Taking the most obvious function, URL shortening, the class simply takes in a valid URL, puts together the API request and sends it along with my username and API key and in return a JSON encoded string.

Download the sample code and have a look here at the live demo.

Note, that the code supplied is not production ready. I would need to have your usual input validation etc..

Feel free to comment!