About DotNetNuke
Since I use DotNetNuke for most of my sites, I run into an occasional problem or nice feature that I write about.
Show Links to Other Sites as Thumbnails
Sometime last year I had an idea for a new product/service, for which I needed to create thumbnail images for web pages. I managed to successfully develop that part but since then, I have been sidetracked by MVC, some Visual Studio 2010 "stuff" and the usual day-to-day work. But I was always fascinated by the little thumbnail images that services like snap.com offer. So much so, that for a while I used their service on my site here.
But, I really didn't like their branding or that people could search and visit other sites from their preview popup. Actually, that is their business model and how they derive revenue from their service. I even contacted them if they had a "pay-for-no-branding" service, but they didn't.
So I set out to "roll my own". Of course I couldn't resist doing this in my current MVC-based web framework. I probably would have been better off implementing it for DotNetNuke, which is what I use for my "real" web sites, but that may still happen.
Here are a few examples of "Preview Links" or links with preview images (just hover with the mouse over the link and wait just a bit):
DotNetNuke.com's Project & Technical Documentation
It is still a work in progress and I have a few issues to address. Also, this site runs on a fairly cheap, underpowered VPS somewhere in Colorado so there is a bit of a delay (at least for me, I'm in Florida) before the popup fully initializes, but it's still a lot faster than clicking on the link to see the full page.
It turns out that creating thumbnails of web pages is a bit more difficult that just hosting a "webbrowser" control on a form and saving the thumbnail. Mostly because the Windows Forms webbrowser control is fairly brain-dead. In addition, it takes at least 10 seconds to create a reliable thumbnail image under the best of circumstances, particularly if Flash or Silverlight are involved. That is way too long to wait for a thumbnail.
The solution I came up with (surprise, similar to what snap.com does) is to implement a website crawler, started using the scheduler, which every once in a while scans the entire site for links that need thumbnails. Another background task creates thumbnails as new links are found. This same background task also creates thumbnails as soon as a user hovers on a link and no thumbnail is available yet. If you were to comment on this blog and use a link in your comment, once you hover over the link for the first time, a thumbnail to your site would be available within about 30 seconds.
Like I said, I was fascinated by the technology. Overall, it's just a gimmick, which probably only fellow geeks can appreciate. If anyone has any marketing thoughts on this, I would certainly like to hear them. 
