New Webthumb feature, Easythumb
Wednesday, November 29th, 2006Updated
WebThumb added a new feature this week called Easythumb. Like the rest of webthumb its still in beta but it makes adding thumbnails too a site much easier.
Easythumb gives you a simple interface to WebThumb letting people with minimal PHP skills integrate WebThumb into there site. It does have a couple drawbacks, thumbnails are always cached (if someone else requested that same url within 24 hours then you get that thumb instead of making a new request), the output sizes are smaller, and some other options won’t be available.
Easythumb lets you generate a thumbnail using an normal http GET call, letting you put the request right in an img src. Easythumb thumbs are always cached, the default cache is 1 day, you can also use a 7 day and 30 day cache.
If a thumbnail is served from the cache it only use 1/5 of a credit
If the thumbnail is generated it uses 1 credit like normal
Note that currently Easythumb only generates thumbnails of sizes small, medium, and medium2
I have a small example script that shows Easythumbs usage it uses a little JavaScript trick to add a loading message. To use it on your site you just need to register a webthumb account. Copy this sample where you want it and update the parameters.
< ?php // configuration parameters $url = ‘http://bluga.net/webthumb’; // make a thumbnail of this url $apikey = ‘your api key here’; $userId = 1; // your user id here $date = gmdate(’Ymd’); $size = ‘medium’; $cache = 1; $messageId = "tmessage1"; $parameters = "user=$userId&url=".urlencode($url)."&hash=".md5($date.$url.$apikey)."&size=$size&cache=$cache"; ?> <html> <head> <title>Easy Thumb Sample</title> <style type="text/css"> .thumbnail { position: relative; } .thumbnailMessage { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 160px; height: 120px; background: gray; text-align: center; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="thumbnail"> <img src="http://webthumb.bluga.net/easythumb.php?<?php echo $parameters; ?/>" title="Generated Thumbnail" width=160 height=120 onload="document.getElementById(’< ?php echo $messageId; ?>’).style.display = ‘none’" > <div class="thumbnailMessage" id="<?php echo $messageId; ?>"> Your thumbnail is being generated please wait </div> </div> </body> </html>
