Over the past few months have had many problem with my screenshots providers. The first one, websnapr stopped giving shots for free in the size I wanted and I had to move on to SnapCasa, which was free and allowed bigger size than websnapr.
But since last month Snapcasa started to be veeerryy slow or couldn’t get the screenshot at all. Many shots went back blanck and that was starting to annoy me.
Alright, some people will argue that it is a free service so you shouldn’t ask the moon. But still…
Then I tried artViper screenshot service. Artviper is a web agency so their main business is not screenshots. Apparently they did this service because they needed it for them self and couldn’t find a go reliable provider. And rather than keeping it for their own use they opened it to the community. As long as you are a non profit page it is free to use.
For the records, I had tried it before SnapCasa but it wasn’t working at the time because all the system was rewritten to improve it.
So this big intro to say that I have switched hover to artViper for the thumbnails of the gallery. And so far so good. The size is bigger than SnapCasa and the quality is better. It works 99% of the time and takes usually a few seconds to load. Many thanks artViper team, you guys rock.
Note: if you are planning to use artViper for the screenshot here is a small hint to help you out. I had trouble getting the right hash to use in the url of the picture. In the automatic email it’s said:
You will need to create a hash from the URL, your userID and your secret key via PHP: $ uID = ‘your_user_id’; $ secretKey = ‘your_secret_key’; = md5($ url . $ uID . $ secretKey)
The url here is the url of the website you want the thumbnails of, not your website. Anyway I emailed the guys and got a reply straight away explaining this.
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Hi, I find your site Googling and need your help. I’ve got my ID and SecretKey from artViper but don’t already understand the hash via PHP.
Do I need to create a php file and how ? Sorry but the help from artViper is really too short me. Thanks.
Yhea it’s a tricky one. Yes you will have to use php to get the hash. For example on the gallery I have a php function that takes the url return the artviper image url with all the parameters at the right place.
Something like:
function getUrl($url)
{
$secretKey = 'xxxxxxxxxx';//replace by your secret key
$id = 'xxxxxxx'; //replace by you id number
$hash = md5($url.$secretKey.$id);
$image_url = "http://www.artviper.net/screenshots/screener.php?url=".$url."&w=640&sdx=1280&userID=".$id."&hash=".$hash";
return $image_url;
}
And then when you want to grab a thumbnail from a site you just call the function to get the url:
echo "<img src='".getUrl('http://mywebsite.com')."' alt='thumbnail of mywebsite' />";I hope I make sense, let me know if you need any further help.
Thanks Ben and sorry to not answer early. I’ve got some problem of unexpected quotes with this part:
$image_url = "http://www.artviper.net/screenshots/screener.php?url=".$url."&w=640&sdx=1280&userID=".$id."&hash=".$hash";And make change like this(with & to validate):
$image_url = 'http://www.artviper.net/screenshots/screener.php?url=".$url."&q=90&h=120&w=160&sdx=1024&userID=".$id."&hash=".$hash"';And the echo didn’t work (for me):
works like a charm
I like artViper because there is no waiting to get the shot (not like their support: never answser to my mail)
But I save the shots after to my server for better load and if their service stop. I look at the source of your gallery: you don’t call for http://www.artviper.net/ ?
I’ve bookmarked your site, love gallery for inspiration and I find some good things in your posts
My code was gone it’s this who work for me:
Seems that wordpress took off some of the code you wanted to show but I get the idea. I am glad you got it working.
On the gallery I don’t directly call artviper because, like you, I save the image on my server for faster load. So I call my php file which then get the picture and save it to a special folder.
And to make it look nice in the html I have a redirect rule.
Thanks for the bookmark
First of all, thanks Ben for mentioning us here and for liking our service.
@Aysseline, did you ever consider there’s something wrong and your mail didn’t come in? Our support is answering every mail coming in, that’s part of our service.
@Ben – just a short note on your RSS feed, as it does not validate. For german special chars, you should utf8_encode all the titles of your gallery items, this should do the trick.
best wishes
Frank
Oups, I though I had sorted my RSS… I’ll have a look thanks for the feedback. I like your new design btw.