I've seen this topic come up regularly on developer discussion lists, forums, etc. What people want to do is to, given a URL, get a screenshot of that page, possibly a thumbnail of it, etc. The reasons are wide-ranging. Some want to be able to put a thumbnail next to a link, as part of a portfolio list, on CD versions of a site (what I want them for), etc. In short, though it doesn't matter why you want them, suffice it to say that lots of people want them.

So, when I found IECapt the other day I was pretty excited. It's a commandline app for Windows that takes a URL and an output filename as arguments and it takes a full page screenshot of the relevant URL. It uses the IE rendering engine, though not the full version of IE. This is an important distinction if you want to use it (though there is a more kludgy way of doing it for "real" if you want and I can detail that later) as it won't pick up any IE sessions you have, cookies, etc. It will render the page as it appears to a raw, new user.

So, what you get is a long PNG or JPG of the entire page. Unfortunately for some of the sites, that can result in a huge JPG. What I wanted was a thumbnail in regular monitor aspect ratio and scaled down. So, using PHPThumb (I'm really starting to like that thing), I used the crop and resize/resample filters and get a 300px thumbnail of a URL.

You can try out the demo script at: http://www.pragmapooldev.com/sitecap/

It will stay up until I feel like taking it down. Keep in mind that it's running on my home DSL test server and we all know how reliable my DSL has been lately.

See the code itself and how to set it up here

While running through Freshmeat, I noticed this UI library with a strange name: qooxdoo. I've seen quite a few of these before, and they all tend to be little more than a couple of draggable shapes. However, for things like HTA's and PHUI (which I'm currently using to build a Site CD Builder of sorts for CD-R copies of web sites, I want a more Windows-like set of widgets. In that kind of environment, making it look just like a regular app completes the illusion. At any rate, I think this one may actually be worth digging a bit deeper.

http://qooxdoo.sourceforge.net/

qooxdoo, web development, javascript, ui

Over the last year or so, I've personally found it amusing that my theory that one of Quentin Tarantino's real skills in making movies is in soundtrack assembly is proving itself. Pretty much all of the songs chosen for Kill Bill were songs that weren't in the "mainstream" until they were in those movies. However, AFTER they're inclusion, almost every one of them is showing up in TV advertising for cars, cellphones, etc.

quentin tarantino, movies, soundtracks, Kill Bill

I've seen more than 1 of the "ports of Struts to PHP" in the last year or 2, but most seem to be more work to implement than the benefit they give. However, this one: Studs, while suffering from a name that will likely hinder its adoption shows much more promise to me than most of the others. Among the very cool features is an implementation of a "servlet" container that retains state. Given how often something like Struts is lauded over PHP on that one feature alone, this is a pretty big feature to include.

There are a BUNCH of other MVC bits out there, but I think I'm actually going to give this one a shot on a project soon.

PHP, MVC, Struts, web development

Yesterday, the aquarium's chemistry settings completely stabilized. I used BIO-Spira to do it and it appears that the product is everything it claims to be. I had been trying to get the tank to cycle on it's own without fish, manually adding ammonia, but it was taking a long time to get to a nitrite spike. I found some BIO-Spira both online and at a local store. I added the stuff from the local store on Sunday and by Monday, the toxic levels I had created had come way down, so I added fish and the bacteria ordered online. Sometime mid-yesterday, the chemistry completely stabilized and handled not only the ammonia I added before the fish, but the fish themselves. There are now 3 Platy's and 5 male guppies swimming around happy in the tank.