Web Thumbnail

As most of you might have known, Joshua Eichorn, author of Understanding AJAX, has written a cool web service called “Webthumb“. Its a nice web app that captures a website and turn it into an image thumbnail.

There are many reasons why we need to create such web thumbnail, Cal Evans mentioned some of them,

  • Graphic Designers can use it to create thumbnails of their work for archival purposes.
  • You may want to create a history of a web page to show it’s progress.
  • Since Amazon is now charging for Alexa’s thumbnail service, you may want to create thumbnails of sites you are talking about on your blog.

He also has made a nice wrapper for us, in PHP off course, made our live easier. You can try it out yourself for free, just download the source in his website here. But you’re going to need API Key for that, just take some simple registration steps here, and you can use the web service to create your web thumbnail up to 250 times a month.

I know, some of you perhaps more interesting in trying it now than go to some websites to see how it really works. That’s why i made this simple script just for you. Just enter the URL website you’d like to capture and your own API Key. Then again, if you’re too lazy to get the API key, just use mine, here (if it failed then it might have over quote, sorry):

5b3e41f00ba60aabf3f1e81d8eec12c5



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