Just a couple of usability thoughts.

Nothing to do with Perl, but when I wrote some code to do roughly this, I added at TITLE attribute to the link, something like TITLE="URL displayed has been shortened for formatting reasons" just so people would get a bit of a hint that they couldn't actually cut and paste or print the URL from display for later use, that they should bookmark, or use the "copy link" function.

And I put square brackets around the ellipsis to make it more apparent too.

And I was going to get around to some code that showed you what the actual document at the end of the URL was, if applicable, for instance a long URL ending in .jpg would get truncated to http://blah.com/[...]/flute.jpg and the like. I never did get around to doing that, and anyway, most of the really long ones were caused by query-strings, not huge directory structures.
--

“Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.”
M-J D