05.20.07
Snap Shots
I’ve added Snap Shots to my blog. It’s a thingy that displays preview images of websites I link to if you hover over a link. Try it out in the post below or on the link up there in the first sentence. It’s pretty neat, but you can disable it if you don’t like it. Any feedback about it is appreciated, if you guys don’t like it, I’ll remove it again 
EER said,
May 20, 2007 at 20:50
I like it
Jonas said,
May 20, 2007 at 21:56
I’ve also added Captcha verification now, as recommended to me by Master_Kale, and in turn enabled commenting by non-registered readers. It’s pretty clever though, in that you’ll only see it if you’re not logged in
Matt said,
May 20, 2007 at 21:59
I’ve heard the Snapshot abuses the servers that it calls, something about it calling for the site every time it generates the thumbnail, thus generating extra server strain. As a web developer, I can’t sponsor anything that abuses precious bandwidth
Jonas said,
May 20, 2007 at 22:09
Eep! I should probably read up on that…
EER said,
May 20, 2007 at 23:28
Apparently, they only regenerate ever so often.
From their faq:
Q: I don’t want Snap to take a screenshot of my Web page. What can I do?
A: If you don’t want Snap Shots to take a screenshot of your Web page, you can instruct your system to block user-agent “SnapPreviewBot” in the robots.txt file.
Also from their faq:
Q: My site got a lot of automated traffic that seems to have been from Snap. What is going on?
A: There are two possibilities:
1. When someone rolls over a Snap Shot-enabled link for the first time, Snap takes a picture of the linked-to Web page so the image can be displayed in the preview bubble. If someone links to many pages at your site, you may notice a temporary increase in automated traffic. However this is generally quite brief because Snap stores the image so it does not generally need to fetch it again. The user-agent for our snapshot-taking bot is “SnapPreviewBot”.
2. Snap.com, our search engine, uses an indexing bot that may occasionally visit your Web pages. The user-agent for our indexing bot is “SnapBot/1.0″.
Both of our bots operate in the IP range of 38.98.19.66 to 38.98.19.126.
So that does not really worry me (also, I’ve seen only one snap-hit on EER.cc so far). What could potentially worry me is that the company behind Snap is the same company that was behind new.net. But I’ve decided that I don’t really care, as it’s a fairly loose connection.
Jonas said,
May 21, 2007 at 16:15
What’s new.net? You have prompted my curiosity!
EER said,
May 21, 2007 at 22:04
Basically, New.net had the idea of selling domain names with new top level domains (like *.travel or *.tech). However, this was a rogue initiative and not authorized by the ICANN. As such, ICANN has separately approved a .travel TLD, so that basically means that two distinct people can be the legitimate owner of http://www.vvardenfell.travel .
The problems are probably obvious, but the problem isn’t as big as you’d imagine. The New.Net domains were only accessible to users who had the new.net extensions installed on their computers. That makes the idea itself fundamentally flawed, but that’s not all. The software I’m referring to had the nasty habit of installing itself without the user knowing or agreeing. Also popup ads were nasty buggers, the source of which was sometimes the New.net components. Last but not least they were not uninstallable by using the Add/Remove Software control panel.
All in all, it was a bunch of spyware. But apparently, it’s not so sucky anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New.net
(note that most of the stuff described in above comment is based on my experience as helpdesk for a local computer shop with customers I had to explain the concept of a ‘mouse’ on a weekly basis)
Jonas said,
May 21, 2007 at 23:35
That… sounds like a concept devised by the Prince of Darkness.
EER said,
May 26, 2007 at 22:07
Talking about cool additions to your blog, check this for pictures:
http://www.inmypad.com/2007/04/wordpress-plugins-imp-auto-slimbox/
Jonas said,
May 27, 2007 at 00:06
Hey thanks for the link. I’m familiar with Lightbox, though, I used it on a friend’s site that’s also Wordpress powered (because I didn’t have time to code it from scratch, and I don’t know enough PHP to make it usable for him anyway):
http://band-cellardoor.dk/photos
Slimbox looks neater, but I already discussed it with OiNutter, and he coded up the ROOC picture display page I usually use. Oi doesn’t like javascript