For quite some time I’ve had a desire to fetch screenshots of webpages in thumbnail form. My last round of development in the area involved a somewhat overly complex solution using Amazon’s AWS Alexa Site Thumbnail service. I chose to integrate with the AWS Alexa Thumbnail service over other services because it just returned an image, no extra crap (Snap’s thumbnails are grotesque) and no ads. Although the service wasn’t free, it only cost a few pennies to use.
The other requirement I have is to retrieve the thumbnails in JavaScript. This lead to the creation my Ajax Alexa Thumbnails project. The AWS Alexa Thumbnail service required a client to interact via a XML web service (similar to the other AWS services), this means signing the request with your AWS credentials; something I wasn’t going to do in JavaScript. The project became too complex for the task; it involved making an Ajax request to a local PHP file which dealt with sending the request to and receiving the response from Amazon. Crazy I know, which is why I’m deprecating the Ajax Alexa Thumbnails project along with the deprecation of the AWS Alexa Thumbnail service in favor of my new solution [below] using Page Glimpse. Continue reading ‘Webpage Thumbnails — Screenshots via Page Glimpse in JavaScript’