New to the thumbnailer:

1)  The user can type in any format of the url.  Example:  http://www.google.com or http://google.com or google.com -  if they type in something like just “google” it will send a default website image not available thumbnail.

2)  If the thumbnailer does not pick up an image for the url given ( such as the website has no data, or is blank, ect. ) the thumbnailer creates a “thumbnail could not be created” thumbnail and send that to the requester.

3)  The thumbnailer can take 0 arguments to 5 arguments as inputs for the thumbnails.

More to come!

-Daniel

Hey All,

The Thumbnailer is ready to be implemented into the form/page/area that the designers are creating.  Once I have the plan from the designers I will finish implementing the security and variable checks.

I’ve ported over the thumbnailer to php and C#.   What can this thumbnailer do?  The php page asks you for a url and image name, you type those in, hit get image, the php speaks with the .exe that takes a screenshot of a page in 1280 x 1024 mode and reduces the image to whatever size the user desires.  The php then reloads that image on to the same page the form was on.  Presto!  A thumbnail of any page you desire, in about 5 seconds after hitting the Get Image button.

Next Step:  I need to streamline the code a bit, add in error handling, some security and make the .exe a little more dynamic so we can do whatever we want with the image on our project.  This could be as simple as loading the image up, or having an image appear upon hovering over a link.

The thumbnailer is coming along as planned.  I will be showing a working product on Tuesday with Adam and the group.

The thumbnailer is being built as a windows server exe for now.  A person using our project will be able to request a URL to create to image from any browser.   The request will be sent to the .exe on our windows server which will process and send an image back to the user’s browser as a thumbnail.

As of now I have communication between the Console and Web Browser.  I am working on the drawing of the page to image.  More updates to come.

Most of you know we found out on Saturday that the Webpage Thumbnailer has restrictions to browser and operating systems.  In order to move the progress along on this, I will be creating a C# executable that can be ran on a windows server, that interacts with the PHP to accomplish what we want for the thumbnailer. 

For now then I will be programming for a particular OS/Browser and once that works to our specifications I will research and program this to expand to other browsers and operating systems.  There are multiple options once we get the thumbnailer working for the specific browser/OS and will discuss those options with the team on Tuesday.