Using thumbnails to give your readers a preview of websites is cool, but it’s a drag to have to make screencaps yourself, and it’s even worse that screencaps are static. Fortunately, WebSnapr offers a free service that automatically captures a thumbnail image of (almost) any website just by appending the site’s address to WebSnapr’s URL.

Just use the following URL to get a screencap:

http://images.websnapr.com/?url=(insert URL here)

For instance, to get a screencap of Blogging Pro, I use the following image URL in between <img> tags:

http://images.websnapr.com/?url=http://bloggingpro.com

which would result in the following image:

Or, if you’d rather have screencaps locally (and you’re too lazy to use your OS’s screenshot functions), you can just save the image, which is actually a PNG generated by WebSnapr’s server.

Preview Bubbles

Alternatively, you can install the WebSnapr preview bubble script on your blog to give your readers a preview of sites you link to before clicking on links. This script automatically captures screenshots of (almost) any site and generates thumbnails for previewing when readers mouse over your links.

The WebSnapr Preview Bubble is a simple, unobtrusive script used to display an overlay bubble showing a hyperlink target thumbnail using WebSnapr. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

You would have to copy some files onto your server, so this probably won’t work with hosted solutions (like blogger.com or wordpress.com). But after that, it’s as simple as assigning a class to the <a> tags of the links you want previewed.

[Thanks to j4s0n for the heads-up.]

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