Yea, that's a good point sunslayer. It's weird , but that site will produce a link for anything you send it. I tried this -->> http://bit.ly/?s=&keyword=&url=gobblediegook
And the site spit out this -->> http://bit.ly/6cx8vo
This site will produce a valid link if you send it yahoo.com, www.yahoo.com, http://www.yahoo.com or http://yahoo.com
So, unless I wanted to write a routine to check the validity of a link before I run the bitly routine, there is not much I can check for. I suppose I could check for at least one .(dot), as the list of valid extensions is no longer limited to .com,.net,.edu, etc.
.ly , I sure never heard of that one.