It's been 6 hours since this was posted and there are still NSFW images on the homepage, one of your differentiators is 'customer support' this really needs to be sorted ASAP.
Even if it's just a static image while you work on moderation, I'd rather not see a disembodied head at 8am whilst eating my frosties..
7 hours ago foxhop just said: "Yeah, sorry about that."
Well sorry about never using your website again. I've just seen things I never want to see again.
Tip: Never launch a site after a day of work. Always launch it when you start your work day. There will always be some problems you like to fix immediately.
I really don't think all that trouble is necessary. A particular user is probably only going to see the homepage once or twice before creating an account, so even just hand-picking 5 images and rotating between them with JavaScript is probably plenty.
I actually built a service like this for internal use a couple of years ago.
I worked at an agency, we were responsible for the web sites of companies of which many were listed at various exchanges. This included handling the publication of press releases. The exchange rules are pretty strict, if a press release is leaked early, you are in a world of hurt. If you publish it too late, you are in a world of hurt. The fines could be draconian in nature.
This led to inane publication work flows, where literally nothing would be allowed to touch anything that could somehow be connected to the internet. The press releases are handed to us in encrypted form. The publication is prepared one day in advance, and at 5am a couple of poor souls have to show up at the office and publish them before the exchange opens, they also have to trigger newsletters. They also had to take print screens of every change they made and file them in a folder.
Because our clients could fine us hundreds of thousands of dollars for mistakes, among other things, I created an automated screen shot service that regularly takes screen shots of certain areas on the client web pages and also downloads the associated html source. External guys audited the application. This is basically just a precaution so that no client can claim we somehow accidentally leaked unwanted information. It's also there to prove that we managed to publish everything in time.
Now of course, once you have something like this in place, someone has to monitor it to make sure it works all the time :) lol...
I have a porn site as a client, and it would actually be very useful for them.
There are a lot (dozens to hundreds) of generated gallery-style landing pages for affiliates to choose to send traffic to, and having thumbnails of the pages automatically generated would make it much easier for the affiliates to browse through them and pick the ones they want to use.
Out of respect, I'll wait until it doesn't show the latest thumbnails on the homepage before pitching it to my client. :)
I've created my own service like this. The goal was to provide an archive of images for clients, showing their website's content over time and 'proof' of this or that. The setup involved a system to create VNC/xvfb screens, which ran a real browser and created a snapshot further processed with imagemagick. This required a bit of a larger VPS than I would have needed otherwise. There was some overhead and complexity. I researched the systems available at the time, and most of them were either too expensive or inadequate (i.e. only provided thumbnails, and we needed full size snaps).
You could run through the sites you grab the thumbnails from and take an educated guess if they should be shown or not.
Most adult sites have an rta meta tag. You can use that along with Alexa and scraping the keywords + domain name for usual suspect text fragments. Might help block out those horrific images that cant be unseen..
Otherwise, love this service and I'm pretty sure I'll be using it
Welcome to the internet, guys. If you have a public place that displays user generated content, it's going to be flooded with the most vile images around.
Since we've already had goatse and tubgirl, I'm guessing the next is lemon party.
I built http://www.bitpixels.com a while ago, when I needed to generate thumbnail images and the available options were too expensive. It's available for free and serves a few million thumbnails a month.
I didn't add a lot of advanced features (it's a side project), but it's stable and gets the job done.
What makes it better than the alternatives, or (as this is MVP) what is your plan to make it different/better? A company I use (http://xbrow.se/) is relatively feature complete and offers a wide variety of different browser choices, do you plan something similar?
ShrinkTheWeb.com has been around a while and (I think) made a decent small business out of this. However, their site is horrific and it's pretty expensive.
A more recent alternative I've used is url2png.com which has been great.
I think the first step is correcting the things you're doing wrong, such as not removing the potential for your site to be showing photos of graphic anal sex on the front page. I'm a bit surprised you didn't 1> foresee the potential for abuse or inappropriate images and 2> fix it immediately as soon as it was brought to your attention.
Being on the front page of HN is a grand thing. Unfortunately you may be not only squandering this chance for positive results, but bringing yourself negative publicity.
Do you have 1:1 screenshots available? Being able to generate a website screenshot for specific OS/browser on demand might be a far better niche than trying to compete in a thumbnail segment (even if you will deliver a better service, there's a SEO battle to consider - make sure you know how to win it).
Great concept, but people are taking advantage of the fact that you're showing the latest screen shot on the right hand side of the page. It's pretty grotesque. You may want to fix that.
Linkpeek.com differentiates competition on api speed, customer support, and flexibility.
We plan to price ourselves in reach for both small site (dynamic web designer portfolios) and large link directories link HN. Also a more flexible billing schedule.
Eventually we would like to add features that only our service provides.
Do you plan on charging for this at some point? I've noticed my bandwidth costs are double due to the traffic coming to my site and the traffic my site generates to get the screenshot.
I created something to do this using VNC and Firefox a few years back. At the time, people suggesting using webkit to do a simulated render (which I suppose is what you did) but we required Adobe Flash. So, I created a rotator which could create up to 20 VNC screens on demand, start firefox, and create an image using vncsnapshot.
There might already be services like this, but I'd love something that quickly that will let me see how my page renders in IE 6+7/8 and also runs validation and speed tests. (quickly is the key word)
Not wanting to be _too_ snarky, but I hardly think "hours of research" translates to "web scale".
Do you _honestly_ think you could keep this up if, say, someone wrote a Wordpress plugin that automatically linked all your eBay sales screenshots into your blog, and Wordpress then installed it on their hosted service?
(Maybe I'm using the term "web scale" wrong, but in my head "web scale" means "the sort of problems Google, Facebook, and maybe Yahoo mostly get right, and almost everybody else mostly gets wrong". And the failure to predict the _first_ thing people would do is point it at goatse is a prime example of "getting it wrong".)
I agree, I was sort of mocking the term 'web scale' as a joke. At this point we wouldn't be able to scale automatically but with some reasonable metrics we could plan capacity accordingly.
It's a nice concept, but isn't it what Silk and OperaMini do? Sort of a pre-render the page and then send that to you? Clearly folks could pull previews off the Google page preview function as well. So I'm wondering at long term utility or a use case.
Even if it's just a static image while you work on moderation, I'd rather not see a disembodied head at 8am whilst eating my frosties..