kwiboo WebSnapShot
kwiboo WebSnapShot was developed to support the technology community as a scalable competitor to the popular WebSnapr service, to create images of websites for use in linking web pages.
The rise and rise of social media and the popularity of digg.com’s digging concept inspired the creation of the DotNetKicks project, where members of the community can submit technology articles that in turn are kicked by other members of the community. Diggs and Kicks are effectively votes for good submissions, and this created a very effective technology resource.
DotNetKicks and kwiboo WebSnapShot
In July 2007 kwiboo launched WebSnapShot to support the DotNetKicks project and reinstate the article thumbnailing that the site had once used with WebSnapr.
This service was provided for the good of the community and since the release of DotNetKicks on the opensource market it is now viral on the internet.
How WebSnapShot works
As a .net development company, you’d expect it to be a .net solution, and while this is true it wasn’t always the case.
The first service released was an ASP.net application that wrappered the command line executable IECapt.exe. This proved to be reasonably effective in taking pictures of website and producing png images, but as use increased the application suffered from an increasing number of processing errors, with IECapt dying on threads spawned from IIS.
In August 2008 the WebSnapShot service was rereleased as an End-to-End .net application, using a mixture of ASP.net, MSMQ and a Windows Service written in .net 3.5 running on Windows 2003 server. The Snapshot is performed by the Windows service, processing requests on the MSMQ, using a WebBrowser object.
Can anyone use kwiboo WebSnapShot?
The answer to this question is yes, however we do maintain a list of Referrers and we do not guarantee the service to anyone bar DotNetKicks.com.
If you would like to use the service, purchase a license to the solution or use the managed service, please contact kwiboo on 01449 677 337.