When we add shortened URL to CTools, could make use of it for things like this:

Reported in a daily report:
"What should I do when I get back the message "Website name is too long"? Here is the URL (you have to be logged into UM library system first to open it):
http://<SUPER LONG URL>
It's for Psych 121 and it belongs in the resources folder for week 9 (dogs)."

[Comment: Support acknowledged that this instructor's URL is too long to accomodate the Web Content tool's URL field. Support suggested using a web services such as tinyurl, bit.ly, or goo.gl to minify the URL prior to posting it to a Web Content tool in CTools.]

My comment:
I don't know how often this comes up but there was url shortener for that's pretty easy to drop into Sakai that shortens against the sakai url space. [1] However no code is yet written to take advantage of it, but it's included by default in 2.8 so we can in areas that are broken like this.

Since it supports ajax, it seems like it would be pretty easy to take any text field (like the Add Web Links page) and add a button that says "Shorten this URL" which would call some javascript out to this service and replace the weblink with a shortened one. I suppose it would also be nice if it did this automatically if the url was longer than the maximum allowed. Doing this client side would probably be much faster/safer to implement, and could be used a few other places too.