There and Back Again

This Christmas Bluga.net WebThumb has 2 presents for your thumbnailing and web snapping needs.

First is the holiday sale, you can get your credits at a reduced price, so use this opportunity to stock up for your 2008 projects. The other present is some exciting new features.

Visual Effects

Visual effects are currently in alpha and allow you to create a thumbnail with a mirror image below, with a dropshadow, or with a border. There will likely be some small changes to these effects over the next few months. If there is demand I’ll also look into adding more effects and options to the current ones.

Effect thumbnails are 300 pixels wide, and are always PNGs, the effects are designed using transparency so they will work on any background color. Effects are a 2 credit feature. To add an effect thumbnail just add, an effect tag to your request. For example:

<webthumb>
	<apikey>api key here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
		<effect>dropshadow</effect>
	</request>
</webthumb>

The possible values for the effect tag are mirror dropshadow border
You can fetch the image using the fetch api by using a size of effect

Custom Thumbnail Sizes

Support for adding a custom thumbnail of any output size has been added. This is a 2 credit feature and is available by adding a customThumbnail tag to the request with a width and height attribute specified. Note that your exact height and width are used, so if you want to keep the aspect ratio you’ll need to do the match with the browser width/height you specify. For example:

<webthumb>
	<apikey>api key here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
		<customthumbnail width="120" height="120" />
	</request>
</webthumb>

You can fetch the image using the api by specifying a size of: custom

Custom Delay times for slow/flash websites

You may have noticed that with flash websites, all the flash content isn’t fully loaded before a snapshot of the page is taken. There isn’t an automatic fix for this, since I don’t currently have a method to figure out when flash is done, but an api solution has been added. You can add a delay tag to your request to specify the amount of delay between when the content is loaded by the browser and when snapshot is taken. The default delay is 3 seconds, the maximum delay you can set is 15 seconds.
Example:

<webthumb>
	<apikey>api key here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
		<delay>2</delay>
	</request>
</webthumb>

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone

Leave comments if you have any questions/feature requests for WebThumb, and don’t forget about the API tester, you can use it to figure out any XML changes without having to write any code.