Alexa style thumbnail images
My site rates and reviews matchmaking and friendfinder sites, and as such, I have an image of the front page of each site with a quick review and info next to it. Currently this is done by doing a print screen in IE, then loading the image in PSP, reducing the size to 20%, linking to it and uploading to the server. This is quite time consuming.
I have recently seen that Alexa is letting sites use their thumbnails to display site images, using the following link:
http://pthumbnails.alexa.com/image_server.cgi?id=[yoursite.com]&size=small&url=examplesite.com
however there are some conditions, and they also say that it is in beta and the option may be removed at any time (I assume without notice). I don't want to change all my html and database to start using the Alexa images, only to have them remove the option in three months time.
Is it possible to generate my own version of the Alexa thumbnail images? Would this be easy to implement, and would it slow down the load time of my pages?
My site is currently using php and mySQL to generate the contents of the listing pages.
Any information would be appreciated.
Many thanks,
Andrew Sawyer
Hearts Affection - your online guide to matchmaking and friend finder sites
heartsaffection posted this at 09:01 — 22nd April 2005.
They have: 26 posts
Joined: Apr 2005
ok, since writing this, I have realised just how much is involved in it. I essentially need to create a small 'search engine' that will crawl all links in the mySQL database say once a month, and update snapshot images of the pages.
Still, I'd like to give it a go - I'm brave!
I'm figuring I need two main things - some coding to crawl the sites listed in a mySQL database, and another bit of coding to take snapshots of the front pages of the sites that are crawled.
I don't need it to go any further into the site than the front page, so that should make it easier, and the database will be manually updated with new sites, so that should ease things up too.
All help gratefully received though!
Andy
andy206uk posted this at 14:58 — 22nd April 2005.
He has: 1,758 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
Try these guys:
http://thumbshots.org/
heartsaffection posted this at 20:39 — 22nd April 2005.
They have: 26 posts
Joined: Apr 2005
Yeah - I was already aware of these guys, however they only have images for sites in the dmoz database. Although this is good for sites listing reletively old and established sites, new sites just won't have an image.
I am also aware of the .cz (I forget the domain) company that went live this March doing the same thing. I was actually looking for help in building a similar service for myself, only on a much smaller scale as part of my existing site.
Thank you though.
Andy
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