Website Thumbshots Service - Betatesters Wanted

For the past month, I have been working on developing a service that offers thumbshots ready to use on directories, sites, whatever you want, just like the Alexa's,Thumbshots.com or Girafa's services (just to name to most known).

In order to tweak it, optimize it and so on, I'm ready to accept a few betatesters.

What will you get from this?

* You will have thumbshots for every listing on your directory.
* You will receive at the end of the testing a premium account which does not have any thumbshots/day limit or backlink requirements (free accounts will have a thumbshots views/day restriction and will require placing a link to the site in the footer).
* You will have the pleasure of helping out.

What do I need from you ?

* Nothing really, just to show thumbshots on your directory.
* Should be wiling to make minor modification to your directory, if needed (for example if your directory template was not designed to support thumbshots)
* Well, I would appreciate if betatesters would PM or email me after a few days and let me know how's the service working, if it's fast or not, if the thumbshots load fast, just general impression, no experience required.

Who should apply?

* Any directory or site owner can apply but bear in mind that :
* At the moment, I can offer support for integrating the service only for free version of eSyndicat because honestly, I didn't have time to see how other directory scripts are designed and what needs to be done for integration.

However, any person with a bit of PHP knowledge or one that knows how to modify Smarty templates should be able to use the servive on any directory.

That's it. If you want to be a betatester, PM me. I'll be accepting up to 10 testers. If you'll be accepted I'll give you my MSN or YM id and I'll help you out with the small configuration needed, as long as I have time.

I'll check DP but about once every 30 minutes or so.

Thanks for reading the post.
Marius

PS. You can check the service already running on http://directory.helpedia.com

 

What render engine did you used?

 

I'm using a custom application, written by me, that uses the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine.

 

Not bad - you can also provide as web-service, with some API, so people could generate thumbnails using your site. You for example could put your service url on thumbnail with little chars
What do you think?

 

Right now, I have several servers that connect to the main server and retrieve lists of URL's that need thumbshots. Each server works on it's own, crawls one URL at a time and, after processing that page, it saved the result as a snapshot of the page.

Once every couple of hours, another application gathers all the information from the servers, creates thumbshots in various formats and uploads the thumbshots to the main server.

I've designed the whole system to scale well when lots of directories use it but the downside to this is that at this time, it's not possible to create thumbshots for one site in real time.

If there is no thumbshot for a site, the system sends a transparent thumbshot, along with instructions to cache the image for one day. One day is absolutely the maximum time a site will be in the system without a thumbshot for it.

Your ideea is a good one, it's not hard to implement and I may offer this feature on larger size thumbshots (120x90 is kind of small for showing text inside the thumbshots).