Is there a simple way to show a thumbnail (maybe 80x80 or 100x100) of a webpage? thru javascript or php or something?
No, there is nothing simple about rendering a webpage with a script. The "easy" way to do it would be to utilize thumbshots.org.
I don't know about using java or php, but go to analogx.com and download the screen capture program, all his programs are very small but work well. You will probably still have to resize the pictures or there may be a way to change it in the settings.
thumbshots doesn't seem to have a lot of thumbs available - none of my sites had 1 available it only seemed to pull thumbs for dmoz listings (im at 2 years pending for dmoz LOL). I tried it out for a while. I'm looking for something for my directory - automated hopefully that would let "premium urls" show a thumbnail of the site next to their listing. If it was a cron process that'd work for me too. Probably would have to get a custom programming job on this I guess (sql select to get the urls to thumbnail, take it, size it, etc) ?
Hi! I trying to find a php script that you just feed it some URLs and it can create the URLs you gave it to some JPGs files on the server side, do anyone know this kind of scripts ?
You are looking for a script to automatically create a thumbnail/screehshot of the webpage given the url? Check this page http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/9182.htm
Yes, I am looking for a script to automatically create a thumbnail/screehshot of the webpage given the url, but after viewing the thread, no, it is not I expecting, What I want is : Use a php script and maybe MySQL to do all that automatically,the script read URL from database and go to the URL grab the page and save it as a thumbnail jpg/png file so I can check the file later. Is it possibile ?
I think that is possible, but just have no idea how it is done. Some websites, such as alexa.com has thumbnails of websites, how do they create the thumbnails?
Err not impossible, you didn't check... Example: http://thumbnails.alexa.com/image_server.cgi?size=large&url=fengshuichinese.com/ is after &url= that's your url...
You would have to use a browser. I looked into this as well and realized that Alexa was the best choice to go with as well.
What do you mean? Alexa obviously has an engine to capture screenshots of websites and store them on their server. But we don't know how to do this on our own. Of course, we can borrow the screenshots from alexa by using the url (http://thumbnails.alexa.com/image_server.cgi?size=large&url=fengshuichinese.com/), but this is not a good solution because we still do not know how to do the capture ourselves using our own script on our own server. Also, notice that the alexa url will only return screenshots for websites already captured by alexa. If you enter a website which never cpatured by alexa, you don't get a screen capture.
I think Alexa is your best bet...if Alexa hasn't captured a site, you can always use Alexa to find the url you are looking for and then "Update the Thumbnail". Thumbshots is pretty good though.... Otherwise you need to create your thumbnails by hand and upload to each relevant site.
Create your thumbnails by hand and upload to each relevant site is tedious if you have a lot of websites to capture. That's why I have been asking how to automate the capture by using scripts or any other addon...
I have a component which you can install on your server. You then need to call the component with a simple line of code. This component can return both the image of a webpage and also its thumbnail. You can set the size of the image and the jpg compression level. The component works with PHP, ASP, Perl, JAVA, Python. If anyone is interested it costs $100.
yeah i would like to see it too there is an asp component that does what you are looking for, http://www.websupergoo.com/abcdrawhtml-1.htm
I looked at doing something similar sometime ago. It involved having a linux box, mozilla browser and gimp imaging software. Basically you need a browser to get the url and render how the page would look, then imaging software to take that output and save it as an image. PHP can then resize that image to your hearts content. I'm not too techie, so I gave up. It can be done. If you can find a good 3rd party solution that you can just install, then that would be my choice. Just found the URL for the one I looked at : http://www.boutell.com/webthumb/
What alexa and similar websites do, is that there are a few servers running, which extract the links from a db, open the web site in a web browser, and generate screen shots. The application that does that is not a web script, but a desktop application. Then the pictures are uploaded into the db. What can be easyer than that?