I have this code that allows users to send a tweet from my blog:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank">Tweet This!</a>

It works great, but I am trying to figure out how to have it convert the permalink to a short url, so the longer urls in my blog will work in Twitter (long urls get cut off). I know there is a wordpress plgin (tweet this) that has this feature, but I can't use that plugin for various reasons.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Use the tiny URL API:

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=example.com
// Would return
http://tinyurl.com/1dqa

However, make sure you have WP-Super-Cache (or at least some method of storing the URLs) enabled, the API is a little slow.

rogem002 -Thanks for the help. I have some experience with php, but obviously not enough. I've been trying to get your suggestion into my code, but I can't seem to get it right. Any ideas of what a sample would look like?

I finally found a good fix that's a little easier for me, and it works great: http://wpengineer.com/tweet-this-with-wordpress/