looking for software...

martijnvandijk

martijnvandijk

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...that allows me doing the following:

I want to build a personal website on which I will have the links to my favorite sites. Nothing exciting so far, however, I would like to have these sites running on my page, not the link but actually the scaled down (sort of thumbnails) versions of these sites. It should have the minimizing effect of a quicktime movie in the dock in OSX.

Does anyone know if such tools exist? I've never seen any site that sort of features something like this

Cheers,

Martijn
 
there are no tools to do this out of the box, but i guess its possible with some extra processing time, bandwidth, and programming ability.

first get a spare computer (or expect to have big slowdowns). then write an elaborate script that opens a full screen browser to each of your sites and does a screenshot every x minutes, then resizes said screenshot to a more thumbnail conducive size while maybe dropping a shadow or something, then overwrite the previous thumbnail and delete the original screenshot to save space. then host them and write a little bit of html to display
 
I know a tool, but it may be way overkill. HP Service Information Portal lets you display the content of a URL within a window, and you can put multiple windows in one page. It's part of the HP OpenView suite, but I doubt that you would spend thousands of dollars for something like that for your purpose.
 
Yes the tool exists, it's called an inline frame (HTML tag: IFRAME). It allows you to display the contents of any URL in a frame in a web page. You can not however scale it (visually). That way the client uses all the necessary bandwidth, processing, etc.

What's your application? The idea of pulling screenshots is cool, but hugely inefficient. I was thinking you could try PHP's imagejpeg() function, but it seems that my OS X 10.1 port of PHP4 doesn't support that.

Unless your site has dynamic action (like for examle, this one) I can't understand why you'd want real-time thumbnails :p but I'm very interested to find out!

As for the special effects, try DHTML. I'm not sure if it'll do what you want but it might, I'm not a big fan of animation for my sites (since they're not accessible-for the most part) so I've steered clear of DHTML.
 
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