What is Digg?83 Comments
- headzoo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+45"Agreed... Who wants to make all those thumbnails? What if your users are providing the links... do you really want them providing the thumbnails also?"
Here's an idea for you.. why not check out the docs and code, before you look stupid. You don't create the thumbnails yourself. It grabs them from http://thumbnails.alexa.com. - eleven, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19Not really all that exciting as it's just a link that displays an image of the site it is supposed to link to. It is not a generated image - just a plain old image that could be anything. If it was using javascript to generate the picture then we'd have something.
- headzoo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10"what, you have to generate the image yourself? I dont see that in the article."
No, you don't. If you look at the source code, you'll see it's grabbing the thumbnails from http://thumbnails.alexa.com. You don't have to do anything more than add the JS to your documents. - MrJiggs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10The "Lorem Ipsum" text is a typographer's tool to simulate real text to test for various things like reflow, layout, etc. I used to use it all the time when building websites, to test how legible text would be with different layouts or text sizes. It's a whole lot better than copy and pasting a single term over and over and over and over...
Checkout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum or http://www.lipsum.com/ for more information or the historical context from which it arose. - zoom1928, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Here's mine:
Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1024x1000x24
DISPLAY=:1 /usr/bin/firefox -height 1024 -width 1000 http://example.com/
sleep 180
DISPLAY=:1 import -window root /tmp/captured.png
convert /tmp/captured.png -resize 100 /tmp/thumbnail.png
Because it uses the X virtual frame buffer you can run it on a server that doesn't have that bloated X Windows installed. You need to load Firefox and turn-off all the extra, annoying crap it ads like the advertisement/bookmark bar, address bar, buttons, and status bar.
Now say thank you since that took me about 50 hours of work about a month ago. - headzoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8It does! Look at the source code.
- meltingrobot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Arrr, there be 404 ahead.
- itswoody, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10yuuuuuckk messed up in Safari too!
- ReubADoob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6nay matey she be work'n just fine now.
- panique, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Dunno why you're getting modded down for reporting the truth that it malfunctions with Safari. I can confirm it doesn't work with Safari too.
- renrutal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I wonder if there's a Firefox Extension which could do that anywhere, and live.
- Chongo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5This would be good if used like a "favicon". Make it a standard or something and any site creator can leave this file on their server and this code can call up the pic.
- mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6It is not a "nice visual effect." It's friggin' annoying. Just what I need: more stuff on sites popping up. I've already disabled Safari's "tooltip URL" that pops up when you hover over a link because it was so incredibly intrusive and the mouse pointer was often over a link or ad just because that's where it ended up.
- kalisphoenix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Hehe... the first thing I thought of was having a mouseover event that triggered (via HTML::Mason) a perl script that would call an Automator workflow that would open the linked page in Safari, take a screenshot of it, resize it using Imagemagick, and then pop it up on the webpage.
Heh. Digg effect the first time anyone visits the page. - mtthwmiddleton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I agree, as a web programmer you need to know how any eye candy you use performs on different browsers, if a fairily popular browser like Safari doesn't work well with this I think people need to know
- bitcloud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4argh tis not september 19th maties... (not that ye needs an excuse)
- WeeklyGeek, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10what, you have to generate the image yourself? I dont see that in the article.
- nicnic77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Not sure how popular http://www.browster.com is but this is clearly a (bad) JavaScript interpretation of it.. I can't live without Browster now, such a clever little idea.
- CiXeL, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4that'd be great for goatse and tubgirl links
- affanjam, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I think it'll be ideal on news sites
- zmigliozzi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3that is sweet! it wins my vote for digg of the day.
- phogasmic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think it is a cool idea and script. Don't understand why so many people are hating on it. It would be cooler if it had a way to generate thumbnails itself. Anyone have any info on how this could be done?
- wingnut21, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8I'm with ya. If he used php to generate the screenshots (something like ask.com) then we'd have something.
- Slashriffs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Guys theres a firefox extenstion that does this
its called Cooliris Previews
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2207/ - kyrre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Does anyone have a script that could easily create thumbnails? I guess starting up firefox at URL and run import -root would do the trick, but it would be somewhat heavy in a busy server environment.
- khoker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2
It probably won't be nearly as cool when http://msnsearch.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?s=MSNSEARCH&r=apple.com turns on referrer checking or just plain goes away. - endyminion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2unobtrusive sidenotes that was on the frontpage before?
I also have to wonder how alexa feels about them direct linking their images... - sman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Completely off topic, but figured I would help out. Is this what you are referring to?
http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/ - jaydee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2just installed it and it seems really good.. thanks
Oh and this actually fetches the content of the page so its realtime - mavrck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2A lot of people use http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/
- mcdonaec, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2They have an open server too as long as you give them credit on your page someplace. One simple change in the code and you can be using their server.
In the javascript search for: http://thumbnails.alexa.com/image_server.cgi?size=small&
and replace it with: http://open.thumbshots.org/image.pxf? - dalesmatrix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Why on earth are the lipsum.com responses being modded down....useful information and MrJiggs post is spot on. I don't understand my fellow diggers sometimes.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Some have questionned the usefulness of this. I love it. It adds a little extra functionality to a site that, as a developer, is appreciated.
If it's not abused, then the user experience will be improved slightly by this. Does not seem to slow down browsing time. - dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Theres a bunch of simple programs that create thumbnails of a website (via the command promt), which with some form of server side scripting (perl, PHP, ASP etc) along the lines of
system("/home/nobody/genScreenshot " . escapeshellcmd($url) . "-width=30 -height=30 -o " . md5(rand(1000) . ".jpg");
(Incase Digg screws up the code, which I assume it will, basicly use the system() command, escape any shell commands, and use it to run the screenshoting program, output the file to a certain name. Keep it (in a varible) so you can put the URL, and the path to the image in a database, and nick it out when you need it..
Not exactly super-simple (then again, not that diffult), but it's less work than manually screenshoting, resizing and linking thousands of links..
- Ben - edraven, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You don't have to generate the thumbnails yourself, he's pulling it from msn. ie. http://msnsearch.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?s=MSNSEARCH&r=www.basement.org
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yes, see zoom1928's posting above
- masterofshadows, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This sounds like something that would be ideal for a cacheing technology of a browser, not for the web page designers themselves
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This video shows the problem with safari
http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/index.php?id=19542&c=false - campingstick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why do code example sites like this make you dig around to see the example? The code is front and center, but seeing it in action is kind of a scavenger hunt. Why is this? If someone says, "check out this cool effect" I want to see the effect first.
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1zoom, very cool, thanks for sharing.
I can see combining that with a lenya deployment - willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Browster works for you. This script works for people who visit your site.
Two different things completely - bethanyb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good idea, but seems like kinda of a lengthy process for such a, what seems to be, simple task.
- wingnut21, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://msnsearch.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?s=MSNSEARCH&r=lemonparty.org
- masterofshadows, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yeah prefetch the page and render a tiny thumbnail of it
- duntuk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1onemillion.. it automatically grabs the thumbs from alexa (which are already premade)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Wow. I almost forgot about "Talk like a pirate day." That is one of the most fun days of the year. :-D
- endyminion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Why is this site on the front page again? I thought was already established that they produce bloated javascript versions of things can be done almost entirely in css which aren't even that useful...
Anyone remember the simple and "unobtrusive" sidenotes?
I'm going back to my nap. Wake me up when you find something that isn't boring... - misteral, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It would be interesting if this could be made into a Greasemonkey script. There's a cool GM script that does this, but only on the google results page: http://flet.ch/things/greasemonkey
- aboyd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thank you.
- daedal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Hmm, only place I could think of (possibly) using this would be on a "Top 5 Links" kind of page, but it's an interesting script none the less.
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