Girafa.com Web Thumbnailer

http://www.girafa.com

Add thumbnail image previews (of web pages) to your search pages, bookmarks, blogs, and any page that displays a text link.

With Girafa's technology - your web site's visitors can see thumbnail sized images of any link they choose, instantly, without the time-consuming task of waiting for each page to load. The thumbnail sized images Girafa creates are small screenshots of web pages. When placed next to search results listings, bookmarks, or any text link, users are able to preview the site before visiting the link - improving the user experience.

This service is a solution designed for the needs of Search Engines, Directories, Yellow Pages, and Web sites in general. The service is hosted on Girafa's servers, and integrates seamlessly with your site.



Experience shows that the use of thumbnails improves searches, increases repeat visits, and increases click through rates. Users are more likely to click on search results that display thumbnail images. The result is an enhanced user experience that increase revenues from search pages.

Girafa offers both paid and free service:

• A free service is available for sites that require up to maximum 2,000 images per day.
  sign up for the free version now. You can use one FREE service per Web site. The free service is available in Homepage Mode only, that means you can request only thumbnail of the homepage of the URLs. For example, the image Girafa provides for the URL http://www.cnn.com/tech/ is that of the page displayed for the URL http://www.cnn.com/ which is the homepage of the first URL.
  
• A premium serice is available for a monthly service fee (starting from $20/month), determined according to the volume of images required for your site, and any customization needs that you may have.

When using the Girafa Thumbnail Service, you have complete control over how the thumbnails are displayed next to your links, and the thumbnails are served free from any search box, or ads.

To add the thumbnail images to your Web pages, all that you need is open a Girafa account and insert a simple HTML code wherever a thumbnail is required.

To dynamically create thumbnail link using PHP, use following PHP snippet:

function thumbnail($url) {

$client_id = ‘abcde1234567′; // your client ID
$signature = ‘fgh7j6ax2′; // the signature you entered @ girafa
$concatenated = $signature.$url;
$MD5_Hash = md5($concatenated);
$signature = substr($MD5_Hash, 16, 16);
$url = urlencode($url);
$str = ‘http://scst.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?i=’;
$str .= $client_id .‘&r=’. $url .‘&s=’. $signature;
return $str;

}

This function returns a complete URL based on the argument you have passed to the function.

What if 2000 thumbnail requests are not enough?
First of all you can buy as much as thumbnails you need. If you don’t have a budget for this premium service, it’s possible to cache the thumbnails on your own web server with this code:

$dom_parts = parse_url($url);
$thumb = 'doc_root/your_thumb/'.$dom_parts[‘host’].'.jpg';
if(!@file_exists($thumb)) {

// next you will use your function
$request_for = thumbnail($url);
@copy($request_for, $thumb);

}

When a URL that you request is not yet known to Girafa at the time its image is requested, an Image Not Available image is displayed instead of the site's preview, and the requested URL is queued to be captured. Capture of new URLs may take up to 48 hours, but usually occurs within a few hours.

Additionally, you should add image link in the page where Girafa thumbnails are shown like following example: