I know I went to art school and all, but I get such a kick out of working on the more technical side of web design puzzles. I just figured one out, so I thought I’d share.

In working on the new blog design, I’d like to display some thumbnail pictures of various websites I frequent. There’s probably a dozen or so of these and they update their content frequently, so I’d like to change my thumbnails accordingly – maybe not in real time, but certainly weekly or maybe even daily. I started looking around on the web for a solution, and there just didn’t seem to be one in my grasp – either hardware platform or cost-wise.

The problem is that if you want to do it yourself, you need a Windows host, which I don’t have (and don’t really want to have, frankly). There are details at zubrag.com if you’re interested in that solution. But when you turn to online thumbnail services, the free ones are slow and/or don’t refresh their thumbnails often, and the for-pay sites are beyond what I’m willing to spend. So what’s a girl to do?

I was already using Page Saver, a Firefox extension from the local web folks at Pearl Crescent. It’s a great tool for taking screen shots – you literally just click and you’re done. It has a bunch of options, including whether to save as jpg or png. I thought for a moment that I might just do that manually every day, but quickly thought better of it. However, if you pony up $15 for the Pro version, first off, you can save the thumbnails directly to an FTP server, and second, you can run it from the command line, which means you can automate the captures. Awesome! (Furthermore, you can specify an ElementID within a page if you only want that one part – double awesome!)

Ran into a bit of a hitch when I discovered that when you run Page Saver from the command line, it will only save to a local file. Hmmm. Not too hard, thought I – I’ll just automate an FTP upload of the local folder I save the captures to. So, with a little searching around, I found a pretty lightweight auto loader at Auto FTP v2. I’ll use Windows Task Scheduler to run the list of Page Saver captures and then AutoFTP the files to my server.

This will work, I think, because I don’t have a ton of sites I want to grab, and I’m not looking to provide previews ‘on the fly’ for, say, all the links in my posts. The thumbnails I grab will be for more static blogroll-type links in the informational area of the new layout. But I’m guessing that the interested student could figure out a way to scrape posts for links and generate a batch file (or whatever) for Page Saver to use to grab thumbnails on the fly.