This is a good example of customization designed to make the user think they're special.
Interestingly, they're simply using a transparent Flash movie with a static image of your site behind it.
They're pulling the image of your site from a .NET driven website which creates a static image of any URL passed to it:
http://204.176.81.80/Google/GetImage.aspx?url=http://blogoscoped.com/
That site must be useful for something else... |
Wow. Nice work. I've always been looking for such an application. Sure, they might shut it down any day, but maybe for some fun, non-critical tools...
E.g. one could download an image of a specific site every-day (say, Yahoo.com), then morph this into an animation after 100 days. |
I made a little PHP that does above...
http://blogoscoped.com/files/downloadsiteimage.txt |
Some interesting observations:
I created this test page, which resizes the window, opens up an alert box, and prints the user agent.
http://gotdoof.com/files/test.html
When run through the image generator, I come up with this:
http://204.176.81.80/Google/GetImage.aspx?url=http://gotdoof.com/files/test.html
It appears to be using the IE engine, based on the user-agent and rendering behavior. So I was expecting to see window borders on my test page, but instead the page area is resized, and everything else is filled with white.
My logs show the hits are coming from 204.176.81.68 and 204.176.81.71 which are user68.sjc-colo.com and user71.sjc-colo.com in reverse dns, but they don't actually resolve back to those IPs. The user-agent is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" |
This is a fantastic find! I've been looking for something like this (the screen capture via URL line) for quite some time now.
Is the screen capture functionality only present on a .NET server? My research has shown that, sadly, PHP does not have that built in functionality. |
to do this with FOSS:
http://www.lafferty.ca/software/webshots/webshot
This worked prett well... I got it from here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/brad/2015327.html |
Sigh. Above hack by Tony to grab a screen of a website via the Google demo stopped working this year. |
