I happened to stumble across something called gnome-web-photo in my package manager which says it creates thumbnails of web sites. It has no documentation I can find, but I figured out how to make it work from a konsole. The only problem is that when I have PHP execute the same command instead of doing it myself it returns "cannot open display: (null)".
I gather apache's user must be stuck in a non-graphical mode. Does anyone know how to let apache's user -- which appears to be www-data -- make use of X?
The rest of the site thumbnail capture procedure:
1) You need to have ssh access to the server's root account -- in other words you need either VPS or dedicated. Also make sure PHP isn't in safe mode (though it's not likely to be on VPS/dedicated).
2) Install the gnome-web-photo package. Use apt, yum or urpmi since there will be a billion dependencies on a server... everything associated with X-Windows, GTK+, libpng and Firefox.
3) Somehow make sure the user PHP runs as (usually the same as apache's user) has an X session.
4) Use <img src="{LINKSITETHUMBURL}"> in your templates to show the thumbnails as of 4.0.2.
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Comments on Site thumbnails
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Joined: Dec 20, 2001
Location: Diamond Springs, California
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I happened to stumble across something called gnome-web-photo in my package manager which says it creates thumbnails of web sites. It has no documentation I can find, but I figured out how to make it work from a konsole. The only problem is that when I have PHP execute the same command instead of doing it myself it returns "cannot open display: (null)".
I gather apache's user must be stuck in a non-graphical mode. Does anyone know how to let apache's user -- which appears to be www-data -- make use of X?
The rest of the site thumbnail capture procedure:
1) You need to have ssh access to the server's root account -- in other words you need either VPS or dedicated. Also make sure PHP isn't in safe mode (though it's not likely to be on VPS/dedicated).
2) Install the gnome-web-photo package. Use apt, yum or urpmi since there will be a billion dependencies on a server... everything associated with X-Windows, GTK+, libpng and Firefox.
3) Somehow make sure the user PHP runs as (usually the same as apache's user) has an X session.
4) Use <img src="{LINKSITETHUMBURL}"> in your templates to show the thumbnails as of 4.0.2.