Posted by Peter Thomas
on March 19, 2009
As we all know, Amazon Web Services is discontinuing the Alexa Site Thumbnail service. The service has been providing developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the pages of web sites that were stored in Alexa’s index. New subscriptions are no longer being accepted, and existing subscribers will only have operational access until June 12, 2009.
The best alternative out there is PageGlimpse. It provides an easy to use API, a Wordpress plugin, .NET library and many other tools and features for FREE.
Welcome!
Posted by Marcio Castilho
on January 15, 2009
TweeTube just released! It is the easiest way to share videos on Twitter. You can share your favorite videos quickly with short URLs. We know how important that is. One of the most coolest features is that it lets you track the visits and comments for the videos you share.
You don’t need an account with them. Just use your Twitter credentials. The passwords are kept encrypted in the database for a short period of time.
The easiest way to use the service is to use the provided Bookmarklet. Just drag and drop it to your bookmarks bar. It is that easy! (Note: If you’re using IE8 though, because of the new security (you know, allow/deny) you’ll need to right click on the link, select “Add to favorites” and “allow” when prompted). After that, when you’re watching a video on YouTube, just click the bookmarklet and share the video.
Sharing a video is really simple. Just press the “Share” button.
For now, you can only share YouTube videos, but in the near future, more video providers will be supported. Happy TweeTube’ing!
Update: Tweetube was brought you by the same developers of PageGlimpse.
Posted by Marcio Castilho
on January 15, 2009
A couple months ago, Rush Frisby, a .NET Developer have come up with a library to make it easier for .NET developers to access the thumbnail service provided by PageGlimpse.
This library makes it very easy for .NET developers to use the PageGlimpse API. The download comes complete with an example you can use to get started. The library can also be used in other types of .NET projects, not just web apps.
This new version adds support for the new ThumbnailExists method, Proxy support and a better implementation of the “nothumb” parameter.
Take a look at http://www.rushfrisby.com/apps/pageglimpse-api-dotnet.aspx
Posted by Peter Thomas
on December 15, 2008
Wheee!! We’ve been chosen this week’s cloud application. Check it out here: http://www.azurejournal.com/2008/12/weekly-cloud-application-pageglimpse/. Don’t forget to VOTE for us!.
Posted by Peter Thomas
on December 15, 2008
One of the most requested feature for PageGlimpse was a way to check whether PageGlimpse already has a thumbnail for a specific URL. This feature is mostly used in applications that want to poll until a thumbnail exists, before displaying it.
The feature was released today. Like all PageGlimpse APIs, this new feature is straight forward:
http://images.pageglimpse.com/v1/thumbnails/exists?url=http://www.techcrunch.com/&size=large&devkey=1234567890
The server will return a JSON string (which you can use in your javascript code) indicating whether the request was successful or not (the thumbnail exists or not)
| 200 |
["result", "yes"] |
PageGlimpse has a thumbnail for the requested url. |
| 404 |
["result", "no"] |
PageGlimpse does not have a thumbnail for the requested url. |
More information here: http://www.pageglimpse.com/features/api
Posted by Peter Thomas
on November 10, 2008
AzureJournal is providing “… the RSS feed you need to subscribe to in order to get the latest news about Windows azure: http://feedproxy.google.com/WindowsAzure. It is using many sources including yahoo, google, MS live news search, blog search (using google), technorati, icerokcet and many more, including Twitter. Check it out!”
We did check it out and is AWESOME!
Posted by Peter Thomas
on November 03, 2008
As you may know, Microsoft released their newest Operating System in the Cloud: Windows Azure. Here at PageGlimpse we’re using “the cloud” mainly Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS). We’re excited though about the new offerings from Microsoft, so here’s a place where you can find everything you need to know about the new Windows Azure: http://www.azurejournal.com.
Posted by Marcio Castilho
on October 17, 2008
One of our beta testers Rush Frisby have created a very nice .NET Library for PageGlimpse Website Thumbnails Platform. This library allows you to quickly integrate PageGlimpse thumbnails into your existing ASP.NET projects with a very easy to use approach. He also have created a demo page here.
Check it out: http://pageglimpse.rushfrisby.com/readme.htm
Download it !
Posted by Marcio Castilho
on October 15, 2008
One of the first major public websites to use the PageGlimpse Website Thumbnails Platform is a very modern search engine implementation that displays previews of websites along the search results. uQuery.com integrates nicely with PageGlimpse and has helped us collect and capture millions of new URLs into our website snapshot database.
PageGlimpse was built from the ground up with scalability in mind since the beginning and we are starting to see many new cool implementations that uses our service.
See how uQuery.com is integrating our services here.
Posted by Marcio Castilho
on October 15, 2008
We have created a PageGlimpse Bubble plugin for WordPress that any publisher can easily download and install directly from their WordPress management interface.
Download here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pageglimpsebubble/
You can see this plugin in action here in this blog by hovering your mouse over the link above. A website preview bubble will appear displaying the snapshot of the site being linked to. This is really easy to configure as it only requires you to signup for a free Developer Key and enter it into the plugin options pane inside the WordPress management interface.
If you haven’t signup for our Private Beta, please do so by registering at http://www.pageglimpse.com.
