Month: September 2006

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IDG.no – our project for last 4 months is now live

I had been introduced to escenic content management framework in last june. After getting introduced our first project was developing solution for IDG, a famous magazine publishing company. We started developing the solution for http://www.idg.no in may and today, the site has been launched. beside our nordic partner, we were around 7 developer here in … Continue reading IDG.no – our project for last 4 months is now live

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মেঘ দেখতে ইচ্ছে করে খুব, ছোটবেলার মত

আমি ছোটবেলায় কাজ না থাকলে বাসার ছাদে বসে থাকতাম ঘন্টার পর ঘন্টা। ঠিক সামনেই খুব প্রিয় একটা ইউক্যালিপ্টাস গাছ ছিল, বাতাসে তার দুলুনি ভাল লাগত খুব। মাঝে মাঝে ঘুড়ি ওড়াতাম – লাটাই ধরে বসে থাকতাম সকাল থেকে বিকাল পর্যন্ত। কয়েকদিন আগে মেজআপু নতুন বাসা নিল, অনেক খোলামেলা – অনেক আলো। আমার বাসা টা একদম বদ্ধ … Continue reading মেঘ দেখতে ইচ্ছে করে খুব, ছোটবেলার মত

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Working for PageFlakes

I join PageFlakes this month as a Flake Developer. PageFlake team recently won the Ajax StartPage race beating Microsoft and Google. As a result, one of the most successful venture capital company BenchMark capital invetsed $5 million in pageflakes. PageFlakes has around 18 members here in Bangladesh, one of the greatest developer team I have … Continue reading Working for PageFlakes

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Creating Thumbnail of WebPages using WebThumb API

Joshua Eichorn, the author of “Understanding AJAX” and a renowned php developer recently released WebThumb, a site to create thumbnails of web pages. The whole system is developed in c and it uses Mozilla engine to render the webpage into images. Shortly after publishing WebThumb, he released a set of API so that developers can create thumbnails from their applications. This API is very simple to use. In this Article we are going to discuss how we can incorporate WebThumb API in PHP to create thumbnail of web pages from our PHP applications.

Using WebThumb API, you can generate a thumbnail in three steps. First you have to place a request containing the URL. As soon as your request is successful, WebThumb store your request in queue. That means you are not getting the thumbnail instantly (well, there are other factors also. to fetch an url requires time, so it is not possible to generate the thumbnail in real time) – In second step you have to check whether your thumbnail has been generated or it is still in the queue. If you get a green signal, you will proceed to the third step where you have to request a download URL of your thumbnails. Before jumping into the code, let’s take a look to the API format.

Step 1: Place a request
To request thumbnail for an URL, you should post an XML message to the WebThumb server in the following format

<webthumb>
	<apikey>apikey here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
	</request>
</webthumb>

You may wonder at this stage that we didn’t discus about the apikey yet. So what is this and where from you can obtain your key? Continue reading “Creating Thumbnail of WebPages using WebThumb API”