How to Grab a Thumbnail Screenshot Of Any Website

November 25, 2007November 19, 2007 by Kieran McCarthy

An easy tutorial on how to grab a thumbnail image screen shot of any website. This is an easy way for webmasters to grab a screen shot of their own websites to include them in their portfolio pages, clients websites or just storing the images for later use.

We will use Snap Shots cached thumbnails to retrieve a web page screen shot. You can grab a small 270 x 173 pixel image or a large 427 x 274 pixel image of your website here is do it how to:

In your html page just call the image from within the <img> tag like so:

snap shot small

or if you want the larger size type:

snap shot big

Make it appear in the browser:

http://shots.snap.com/preview/?url=http://www.kmcgraphics.com

Type the above url into you browser address bar to get the image. By default the small 270 x 173 px appears if you want the large version 427 x 274 px just append &size=large to the url like so:

http://shots.snap.com/preview/?url=http://www.kmcgraphics.com&size=large

Dont forget to change the url http://www.kmcgraphics.com in my example to the website domain you want to grab.

Give it a go right here:

Type in your domain name and select small or large then submit.

I cannot see my website screen shot why?

The Snap Shots website bot has not yet visited your website, it will not have a cached screenshot of your website therefore you will see this image:

If this happens just leave it there on screen for a minute so that the Snap Shots website has time to visit the url and take a screen shot.

Just refresh your page again after 1 minute and the image should appear, if not try again after few minutes.

Please do not hotlink to the image on the Snap Shots website just wait for it to load in your browser and then select save image as, also by default the image will be named”preview.jpg” change this to your liking. Thats it…..

Update on Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Problems

November 14, 2007 by Kieran McCarthy

In my last post I mentioned about problems connecting to my own blog from my home broadband connection with Imagine/Gaelic Telecom. Although it is now fixed I am still having problems accessing my friend Robert’ Sweetnam’s Blog. I am accessing his blog through proxify.com its the only way at the moment – I rang Gaelic Telecom/Imagine support again last Friday night complaining about not been able to view his site.

I was asked if I have “Content Filtering” enabled which I said no and his reply was “Well I really haven’t got a clue why you cannot access http://blog.sweetnam.eu” he went on to say “I will send a ticket up to tech support and see what they say” he also asked me for my mobile number so a “techy” could ring me back within the hour, but as expected I was left still waiting on the call.

Monday morning came and lo and behold I got a call back from Gareth “the techy guy” at Imagine Telecom Support. He said they were still looking into the problem and that he would call me back before the end of working day. He also suggested that they change my IP address as that would surely fix the problem, I said no to the IP change and left them to it but hence to say I got no call back.

Left it stew for Tuesday….

This morning Wednesday I called back support went through the whole “rigga’ ma’ roll” (procedure) again with general support and demanded some answers by today. An hour later Gareth called back with the solution of changing my IP and I quote what he said…

“It appears that you turned off “Content Filtering” back in June 2006 (which I did) but it seems it didn’t go through properly. You were going through a proxy server where your content was been cached, to help speed an stuff.”

So Robert was right as mentioned here “they” could track my where abouts if they wanted to!

Back to the solution… I caved to the IP change in the end and was supplied with a new IP address over the phone. I went home reset my router, flushed the dns, cleared my cache etc. re-booted and opened up Firefox typed in http://blog.sweetnam.eu and guess what?

No F**king joy!

Back to the idiots again tomorrow to tell ’em to shove their solution up the highest part of their holes.

Pubs Of Youghal – Google Maps

November 10, 2007November 8, 2007 by Kieran McCarthy

Pubs Of Youghal - Google Maps This a Google Maps visual tour of the pubs of Youghal, Co. Cork, Ireland. There are 28 active pubs and bars in the town. Click on markers to view photos, address, telephone numbers, pub info etc.

I created this map just for fun but also to play around with ideas on how to code for Google Maps.

Click here to view the map

If you ever get around to having a drink in all of them don’t forget to mention I sent you there…

Youghal Clock Gate – Live Clock Screensaver

January 9, 2012November 7, 2007 by Kieran McCarthy

Click here to view the “Youghal Clock Gate – Live Clock”

I created this flash live clock from a picture of Youghal Clock Gate. If you keep watching the hands on the clock you will see them move in real time based on your own computer’s time clock, it was an idea I had for a while so if you like it you can download the free screensaver.exe version or the flash movie version from the links below.

You are free to use and share these files also there is no malware, spyware or any nasty stuff in any of these downloads, just a bit of fun.

Click here to view the “Youghal Clock Gate – Live Clock”(new window)

Click here to download the screensaver.exe version (1.25MB)

Click here to download the Flash file version zip (66KB)

Youghal Clock Gate

In 1777, the town’s Clock Gate Tower was built on the site of Trinity Castle, part of the town’s fortifications. It was used as a prison during the rebellion of 1798, and a pole lashed from the lower windows to the corner of the first house on South Main Street (now Luigi’s) was used for hangings. Thomas Gallagher was one of those hanged for trying to seduce a soldier from allegiance to his regiment. Numerous forms of torture were conducted therein including thumb screws, pitch-cap, rack and the lime boot and flogging. The Clock Gate served the town as gaol and public gallows until 1837 when it was considered “defective in several of the accommodations essential to the health of prisoners”. It then became a family home until 1959 when the last family left.

Youghal Clock Gate – Live Clock Screensaver

Connection Problem On My Own Website – Imagine / Gaelic Telecom

February 7, 2013November 5, 2007 by Kieran McCarthy

Gaelic Telecom I haven’t been able to connect to my own website with over 2 weeks, I could ftp or use a proxy server and that was fine but no browser connection with either FireFox or Internet Explorer.

By the way my broadband connection is with Gaelic Telecom who are a white label for Imagine so on Friday night last I called support and ran through the usual things with them but no luck, the following night still no feedback from support so I decided to try a different route. I used the ip address to access my site with a forward slash tilde /~ and username and it worked this is what I used: http://64.191.9.37/~kmcgrap this auto redirected me to http://lonestar.kjbserve.com/~kmcgraph/ and I was able to view the website.

The strange thing is that when I tried the url http://www.kmcgraphics.com everything worked. Its like it updated DNS or something.

I don’t know if this was the solution or just coincidence but it worked for me.

Anyway if your interested below this is the email I sent to support@imagine.ie followed by the reply I received this morning. I’m hoping this post might help others out there if they have stumbled upon the same problem.

Email sent to Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Support

Hello,

My Internet Connection is fine but I’m just having problems connecting to ONE site http://www.kmcgraphics.com

I’m running Windows XP Professional SP2. with browsers IE7 & Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8

Measures I have taken so far:

1. Cleared Internet Cache and Cookies.
2. Rebooted router and computer.
3. Tried accessing it in different browsers. (IE7 & Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8)

Some Observations:
1. I can access the site through a proxy server fine.

Other steps taken:

Command prompt:

ipconfig /flushdns

Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

I have done a Tracert from command prompt as follws with the results below:

tracert www.kmcgraphics.com

Tracing route to www.kmcgraphics.com [64.191.9.37]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.254
2 26 ms 25 ms 27 ms lns2.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.25]
3 22 ms 63 ms 24 ms ve5.core.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.129]
4 22 ms 23 ms 22 ms ge0-0.border2.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.2]
5 26 ms 29 ms 25 ms ge-1-0-0.32.mpr2.dub1.ie.gvnx.net [217.112.145.1
1]
6 26 ms 24 ms 24 ms 67.17.193.45
7 106 ms 106 ms 108 ms 67.17.108.58
8 106 ms 105 ms 105 ms hostnoc.demarc.gblx.net [64.214.106.38]
9 1050 ms 113 ms 112 ms ge2-oc48-1-0-ctsi.rtr0.scr1.hostnoc.net [66.197.
191.34]
10 112 ms 111 ms 113 ms www.kmcgraphics.com [64.191.9.37]

Trace complete.

Also tried to ping:

ping www.kmcgraphics.com Ping request could not find host www.kmcgraphics.com. Please check the name and try again.

And finally the usual error response from the browser window:

The requested URL could not be retrieved

——————————————————————————–

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.kmcgraphics.com/

The following error was encountered:

Unable to determine IP address from host name for www.kmcgraphics.com
The dnsserver returned:

Server Failure: The name server was unable to process this query.
This means that:

The cache was not able to resolve the hostname presented in the URL.
Check if the address is correct.

Your cache administrator is support@imagine.ie.

——————————————————————————–

Generated Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:55:01 GMT by filter6.int.imagine.ie (squid/2.6.STABLE13)

Can you please advise on what to do here, I can access www.kmcgraphics.com from any other computer not from my home connection with no problem.
Is there possibly a dns cache problem with my connection and filter6.int.imagine.ie ?

Hope to hear soon,

Kieran McCarthy

Response back from Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Support

Hi Kieran

All of the filter servers now have the IP address for this host, but it seems that filter6 did not have it at the time you had the problem. We’ve no known problem with DNS at the moment.

This could have been a once-off problem, or it may happen again; if it does, then email us again and we’ll look into it again as quickly as possible.

We would suspect this to have been something to do with the DNS for that domain, rather than being a filtering problem here or being a imagine dns problem.

Imagine Support

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