There and Back Again

Once the dns change fully propagates Webthumb will be back up and fully running. If you had a different apikey on the backup instance you will want to switch back to your normal apikey. Your apikey is viewable on your user home page.

More news and a we’re sorry gift of credits will be coming soon.

My blog and the rest of my sites are back up again, running on new hardware.

The 2nd backup server/thumbnail processor is still waiting on some heat sinks before it can get installed but now were running on a server with next day dell support.

I’ll have more details on webthumb changes once the dns has been updated. But the biggest difference will be a full time backup API which will be available all the time and support transparent fail over.

The pear wiki, and phpdoc.org should be back as well.

Webthumb hit 5 million thumbnails some time last night. This blows away the last million time, taking just 34 days for this million.

On that note contact me if you are interested in bulk purchases of credits. For purchases of 250k credits or more the rate is $1.25 per 1000. If you will be using more then 250k credits a month additional discounts are available, depending on your usage patterns.

Error handling for Webthumb job requests has changed. Requests with bad urls are now silently ignored instead of dropping the entire request at the first error.

This will fix problems with bad urls in multi-request submissions. Let me know if you have any concerns.

For anyone using Easythumb I have good news and bad news. The good news is the rate for cached thumbnail delivery has been changed to .05 credits. The bad news is the bug where you weren’t getting charged for cached thumbnail delivery has been fixed. If you get an image that says “out of credits” that means you’ve used up your limit for the month. You can purchase more credits to continue your use.

Webthumb generated its 4 millionth thumbnail on monday

The official time was 2008-08-11 11:09:49.

I’ve been making good progress on the thumbnail rates lately, this million was a bit faster the last. If you want to help me hit the next million check out the site, if you want to buy 250,000 credits or more send me an email I have bulk rates available.

Thanks to simplificator there is now a Ruby gem for using the Webthumb API.

Announcement and installation instructions
Readme

Its new feature time for webthumb again. Today i’m making the alpha release of video thumb.

Videothumb gives you the option of getting back a thumbnail of the video on a given url instead of that page. So if you thumbnail Simon’s Cat ‘Cat Man Do’ you can get

instead of
.

Videothumb gives you a thumbnail from the beginning of the movie (this may change) one from 1 second and one from 5 seconds, and all the normal sizes made from the first first frame snapshot.

To enable videothumb for your requests just add a videothumb tag to yours requests like:

<webthumb>
	<apikey>key here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ffwDYo00Q</url>
                <videothumb>1</videothumb>
	</request>
</webthumb>

If a supported video url isn’t detected a normal thumbnail will be created, so you can easily enable videothumb for all your requests.

Videothumb currently only works with youtube but I will be adding support for a bunch of other sites over the next couple days.

Currently videothumb is only available as an addon to webthumb, but may be made available as a separate api with additional features if there is demand.

The server is back up DNS should be updated for most things. Send me email jeichorn at gmail.com and josh@bluga.net if your still having any problems.

There will be a server outage today starting around 6:30pm Arizona Time

The servers will be getting new IPs during this time so assuming we don’t run into DNS problems everything should be back up in around 2 hours.

I will twitter the status of the outage since this blog will be down too.

Services affected include:

• Webthumb
• svn.pear.php.net
• phpdoc.org
• this blog
• My other random sites

If you are a webthumb customer and have any concerns email me at jeichorn at gmail.com
Hopefully I will have an alternate endpoint up during the outage, but I just heard about the data center problems 15 minutes ago so I’m not sure if i will get it up in time.

Webthumb generated my 2 millionth web page thumbnail yesterday.

My first million took 564 days
This second million has taken 84 days

So i’ve finally given in and joined twitter and started mo-blogging with flickr.

I’m also looking into Bemba, since it’s one of my WebThumb customers.

A WebThumb drupal module has been added allowing you to easily use WebThumb in a drupal site. I haven’t had a chance to use the module but the code quality looks good.

I’ve added an API call to get the credit status of your account. You can use this to track your usage and to see if you need more to purchase more credits.

This feature was added due to a customer suggestion, if you have a suggestion let me know.

The WebThumb API docs have been updated. Your feedback on the docs or the API itself would be appreciated.

I would like to make a new version of the API at some point, the goal in that would be to handle errors cleanly as XML responses and too allow for other services to use the same end point. Of course an API update isn’t at the top of my list, I’m going to generate over 200,000 thumbnails this month (compared to 179,190 last month and an average of 61,000 per month last year)

This new demand has put scalability improvements to keep up with the growth as my next job to tackle (after these new docs of course :-).

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.

The new WebThumb website has finally been launched. Gone are the days of the super plain website, now were Web 2.0ish.

WebThumb now has the ability to produce PNGs instead of JPEGs for snapshots. The PNGs are about twice the size of the JPEGs but they offer less artifacts and a much crisper thumbnail. Turning on PNG output makes a thumbnail cost 2 credits, to enable PNG output just add an output_type tag with a value of png. And example is shown below.

<webthumb>
	<apikey>apikey here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
                <output_type>png</output_type>
	</request>
</webthumb>

The last few weeks have seen a number of new features added to WebThumb. These changes have been little things like a new usage graph on the website to more exciting thing like excerpts and really tall snapshots.

Excerpts

With thumbnail excerpts you can get an image from visible part of the webpage. This is on by default and grabs a 400×150 image from the top left corner of the website where most people’s logos are. Using the API you can specify an excerpt from anywhere. Note that if you take a excerpt that is larger then 800 wide or 600 tall the request will cost an extra credit.

API example of customizing an excerpt

<webthumb>
    <apikey>apikeyhere</apikey>
    <request>
        <url>http://blog.joshuaeichorn.com</url>
        <excerpt>
            <x>0</x>
            <y>15</y>
            <width>1024</width>
            <height>120</height>
        </excerpt>
    </request>
</webthumb>

Sample Output

API example of fetching an excerpt

<webthumb>
    <apikey>apikeyhere</apikey>
    <fetch>
        <job>wt46fd34663e680</job>
        <size>excerpt</size>
    </fetch>
</webthumb>

Tall thumbs

The API has been updated allowing you to request thumbnails up to 2048 pixels high. This value could be increased in the future if there is demand. All thumbnail requests over 1024 pixel cost 2 credits. Note that once you use any 2 credit feature (large excerpt, tall thumbnail, full size output) you can use the others for free.

To make a tall thumbnail you just request set a large height in your request.
Example

<webthumb>
    <apikey>apikeyhere</apikey>
    <request>
        <url>blog.joshuaeichorn.com</url>
        <height>2048</height>
    </request>
</webthumb>

Example Output

Full size snapshots

Full size snapshots aren’t a new feature, but they haven’t really been advertised. All you have to do is a fullthumb tag to your request and you’ll get an image that is the full size of the browser. Fullthumb requests cost 2 credits.

Example fullthumb request

<webthumb>
    <apikey>apikeyhere</apikey>
    <request>
        <url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
        <fullthumb>1</fullthumb>
    </request>
</webthumb>

Sample Output

Other Stuff

• Image resizing on thumbnails has been updated so if you pick non-standard dimensions for the browser you’ll get back thumbnails with the same height/width ratio.
• The result from a request now includes the credit cost, so you can tell if you were charged for a fullthumb etc.
• Bulk rates are available for people making over 2500 requests a day, contact me to find out rates.
• Older thumbnails are being deleted from the system, the length of time that thumbnail are stored will decrease as webthumb usage continues to increase but it shouldn’t go below 48 hours.
• A tool for testing the API has been added, it lets you make API requests to learn the API without doing any setup.

WebThumb has been moved to a new server. Right now its running 4 times the processing capacity of the old server. I’m looking into ways to expand that capacity further as needed.

The only outstanding issue is getting the PDF plugin to work again, hopefully that will be fixed by the end of the week.