I’ve added a little bling to the profiles at planetlotus.org. They now feature a thumbnail of your blog front page, just to the left of the *twitter image. This is done through a service call to http://www.girafa.com. Girafa offers free thumnail images of web pages. Free up to 2,000 calls a day. The implimnetation was pretty easy but the registration process was a little teadious. Anway there are some drawback that I wanted air before the emails come in.

  • They don’t have images on file for all sites. Not sure why but im hoping our calls will add to the weight in their collection algorthim.
  • The images is of the url’s root, which can be a problem for most blogs that are parked 2 folders deep in the path. I believe this is addressed in the for pay version.

I’ve recomended to Bruce that he could use this for LinkJam in some way. I know he is working on a way to capture favicons.ico like Connections does (maybe he has already), maybe he’ll share his solution. Im sure its out there somewhere, after all, the internet knows everything!

Examples:

http://planetlotus.org/profiles/tim-tripcony

http://planetlotus.org/profiles/bruce-elgort

< –UPDATE–

My image is now showing, it wasn’t yesterday, so if you lack an image, click on your profile once or twice a day to ring some bells back at girafa.com.

–UPDATE– >

Enjoy.

* Twitter Integration