Random Site of The Day

[echo@]

Hi, All, I have been looking for some help on generating images of URLS (running local to my host.) PHP or Perl script, I have looked almost everywhere and wondered if anyone else has had more luck in finding a script.
There are 3rd parties that host these services which work, but are slow or expensive. Ideally a PHP script that could generate a 100x100px png or gif of the URL provided.

I have implemented a "Random Site of The Day" Modification from the indexudirectory but it looks like zubby manually creates his screen captures and associates to the relevant webpage. Which is a lot of hard work..
The blog is here http://www.indexudirectory.com/blog/...te-of-the-day/

The mod could run anywhere desired within indexu, If there is a open source php script available somewhere or someone decides to create one it would be a nice feature to add to indexu.

Seeing a preview of the site in the search results really sets it off.

[Bruceper]

I think this might be worth a big donation to me

<img src="http://msnsearch.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?i=%204ac8babd1cf73ace&s=MSNSEARCH&cy=en-us&r=$domain" />

TA DA!

OK, so it's kind of cheating. And you could be blocked by them at any time I suppose. But it works.

You should also be able to use Alexa as well (using the Amazon AWS service), but you're looking to do it right from the server which is hard to do.

I'll keep looking for other solutions.

[Bruceper]

I found this one for linux servers http://www.boutell.com/webthumb/

[echo@]

Thanks for the info brucekeeper, I have visited these sites already, I spent about 3 hours , really I wanted my host to generate the url images but it seems there is nothing out there that can do this across all browsers for perl or php.

http://www.boutell.com/webthumb/ Seems to be mozila only and im not to sure how I would go about even testing this one. (on a shared uk2net host )

at the moment im using http://www.artviper.net/ to generate my screen shots.

Thank you for offering your msn service too.

Well at least I can say it works, i hope this becomes a readily available php/perl script someday in the future for webmasters.

Thanks again Brucekeeper for your quick and knowledgeable responses, I really appreciate it

[Bruceper]

To run webthumb you'd need to be on a dedicated box with root access.

It's just not easy to do on a linux box because there is really no way to generate the screenshots. It can be easily automated on a windows box.

[FSGDAG]

It's just not easy to do on a linux box because there is really no way to generate the screenshots. It can be easily automated on a windows box.

In that case, you would just be giving up one small headache for a HUGE headache!

Definiately NOT worth moving to a Windows box just for generating images... I really dont think the way Inspireme's mod for this is all that difficult. http://www.nicecoder.com/community/s...61&postcount=3

It does require you to manually do it, and the first time ( if you have alot of links already ) does take a little bit of time, but each time after that is very easy!

[Bruceper]

It is easy afterwards, and even easier if you make a screenshot a required field and make the users do it. But then again they may not know how and might give up. It's a toss up.