New Webthumb feature, Easythumb
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"; ?> <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>
Joshua Eichorn’s Blog: New Webthumb feature, Easythumb…
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Fantastic that was thati was waiting for, it works perfectly, thanks to programmers.Have a nice day.
[...] don’t forgot about the EasyThumb api, its a very simple to use API and would be great for Wordpress search plus thumbnails or [...]
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
Mike: There is an XML REST API to do that sort of thing. There is a nice PHP wrapper at http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1069
Hi, it isnt working at my page. If i check ist, asythumb.php always says: “Bad Hash”. Is somehting changes? Please help! Thanks!
Michael: Email me josh@bluga.net and we i’ll help you debug, things should be working, the test scripts are all working fine.