Link shortening has been around for a long time, and Bitly is arguably the king of link shorteners. It has support for shortening long URLs as well as custom short links, custom domains, and metrics to track how each link is performing.
For those of us with the power of code at our fingertips, Bitly also has an API. With the Bitly API, you can build all of the functionality of Bitly into your own applications and expose it to your users. In this post, you’ll learn how to use the Bitly Ruby gem to use the Bitly API in your Ruby applications.