New Webthumb feature, Easythumb

by Joshua Eichorn on in PHP, Webthumb

Updated
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";
?>


        Easy Thumb Sample










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9 thoughts on “New Webthumb feature, Easythumb”

  1. Pingback: PHPDeveloper.org

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  4. Mike Bergman says:

    Hi Joshua,

    This looks to be a fantastic service and API.

    I have a database on my blog of semantic Web tools that I want to loop over and display a thumbnail of each site. (See http://www.mkbergman.com/?page_id=325). Can you suggest a modification to your script that would work for this purpose? (I want to pass an internal url in the database to the $url PHP parameter.) I also really only need to cache every 30 days; do you have documentation on the script parameters?

    Thanks for this neat service!

    Mike

  6. Michael says:

    Hi, it isnt working at my page. If i check ist, asythumb.php always says: “Bad Hash”. Is somehting changes? Please help! Thanks!

  8. roberto says:

    Hi,
    I receve a follow message:
    Bad Hash
    but i don’t understand the cause…
    i have updated the parameter with my key and user, but don’t work…

  9. roberto says:

    ok, solved the “problem”. I don’t see how build the hash string
    md5(date(‘Ymd’).$url.$api_key)

    Thank’s for this great service

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