Results tagged “web services”

If you use Drupal and would like to automatically generate thumbnails of web sites, you might want to take a look at the Bluga WebThumbs module. Once that module is installed on Drupal and you have given the module your Bluga WebThumb API key, you can then inject a PHP snippet like this into a node using the PHP filter or into a theme file:

<?php
print bluga_webthumb('http://contentment.org/');
?>

Now, when you view the page containing that snippet, you will see a thumbnail generated using the Bluga WebThumb service within a few seconds that shows that web site. The thumbnail is cached locally on your server.

You can further customize your thumbnail with many options. You can read the full documentation for the module at Drupal’s web site as well. New features since March of last year also include a script for updating the thumbnail in place without requiring a page reload and a nicer looking (and CSS-styled) place holder, which is an improvement over the graphic previously used.

Last week, I was approached by the owner of Konigi.com to do some Drupal work. He’s a user of the Bluga WebThumbs module I wrote in March of last year and wanted to see it work with Drupal 6. I have finished the update and have made a full release of the Drupal 5 version of the module after making a few improvements and then ported the module to Drupal 6.

Cheers.

Okay, so now that I have my fancy new blog, it's time to start blogging again. For the past month or so I've been a little short on spare time, but what time I've had to spare has been spent playing with two new toys: Twitter and OpenResty.

Lance got me hooked on Twitter and it's pretty cool. For those that don't know, it's kind of like a Facebook status if you know what that is, but it's more than that. It's also like have a public instant messenger that you send to everyone and everyone you're following sends to you. It's also like having really short blog posts. Anyway, it's kind of cool for those quick things you find and think, "Dang, that's neat, I'd like to share that with my friends." Things I used to post to the K-Slug channel on IRC no go to Twitter. Now, I just need to get more of my friends on there to see them. :)

The other thingy I've been messing around with is OpenResty, which is somewhat of an intriguing solution for serving a RESTful web service. Basically, it's just a web service API that allows you to create database tables, rows in those tables, users, control access to the tables, etc. It provides no UI at all, just the ability to GET lists of or individual resources, POST new resources, PUT updates resources, and DELETE resources. You can then build a front-end to the data using whatever application server you like, client-side JavaScript, Adobe AIR, etc. (If you want the buzzword, this is very "Web 3G"---I'm now looking for a waste basket to puke in.)

Anyway, I'm kind of in search of a problem to solve using OpenResty to find out what it would be really helpful for and I'm just really intrigued by what it offers. But that's what I've been dinking around with lately.

Cheers.