There and Back Again

Updating my blog today got me thinking about what the other planet-php blog out there looked like. I was in a great spot to do a quick overview since I happened to have a script that makes the thumbnails using an embedded mozilla (this script is a long story but sufice it to say this was a nice simple one in python, but I have have a little c++ app that uses mozilla to make pdfs).

After that it was just a matter of getting a list of all the planet-php websites, oddly enough planet-php doesn’t export this list in any xml format that I could find, but since the DOM extension in php5 can load up HTML it wasn’t a big deal. I just copy and pasted the source for the list into a file and I was ready to go.

After that it was just waiting, and fixing problems. The main ones where George Schlossnagle’s blog which always even though I could load it in my browser and Harry Fuecks’ phpPatterns site since it seems to be dead. Other then that it was just cleaning up escaping.

And now for the fun part, take a look at thumbnails of everyones sites.

At some point I’d like to move this python code over to my C version and then setup a page to give anyone the ability to make thumbnails but, since each running script requires its own Gecko engine i’m afraid i’ll kill myself performance wise.

Update

This little project was the beginning of a long journey, I have a webpage thumbnail service now with an API, if you want to do something similar check it out.