Instant Site Thumbnails for Your Posts Using PageGlimpse

I’m often grabbing screencaps of sites and then throwing them into Fireworks or Picnik to edit them and then editing them and resizing them and cropping them and then uploading and pretending like it is all an effective process. Usually I just want a nice screencap to setup a post.

I found a bunch of API-based services that create thumbnails. I chose to use PageGlimpse and then used a bookmarklet intended for WebSnapr to hack together a 1-click-make-the-thumbnail thingy. This is a bit involved.

Get a PageGlimpse Developer Key. This lets the PageGlimpse service know it is you asking it to cough up a screencap.

Go to http://www.pageglimpse.com/signup and sign-up. Once you activate your account you’ll get a developer key that will look like a random collection of letters and numbers.

Next, drag-and-drop this link to your Links toolbar in your browser >>> Create Thumbnail. Don’t click it. Click-and-hold-and-drag-and-drop.

Now you have a link to Create Thumbnail is in your Links toolbar. You need to add your developer key to it.

Right-click on the Create Thumbnail link in your Links toolbar and select Properties.

You’ll see the long ugly script that fires into PageGlimpse – it will look something like this:

javascript:void((function(){location.href=location.href.replace(/^http\:\/\/([^\/\@]+)/,”http://images.pageglimpse.com/v1/thumbnails?devkey=DEVELOPER-KEY-GOES-HERE&size=medium&url=”+”$1″);})())

As you can imagine, replace DEVELOPER-KEY-GOES-HERE with your PageGlimpse developer key and save.

Now go to a site like CNN or TechCrunch.

Click on Create Thumbnail.

PageGlimpse should return a nice juicy screencap for you.

You can then save that image or add it to a post.

Alternate fun: replace the size variable (set to medium) with small or large.


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