Thumbshots: free website previews
So you’ve got a list of websites you want to illustrate with thumbnail images - a bit like those Alexa or SnapPreviews you see on some sites.
Try Thumbshots - the free, pretty good* alternative to the premium options like Alexa.
With Thumbshots, you just specify your image source URLs in the following format, where for example www.apple.com is the thumbnail you want to display:
http://open.thumbshots.org/image.aspx?url=http://www.apple.com
Which will give you:
I’ve used it liberally as part of the Digitalgovuk bookmarklist, to show what each bookmarked site looks like.
* I say ‘pretty good’ as it only seems to have homepage thumbnails for domains, not subdomains or subfolders (so all Twitter or Facebook page thumbnails look the same, and ditto for Wordpress.com blogs I think); and its coverage isn’t universal.
