ShrinkTheWeb nonsense.

Ok, got it all working a few months back. But since then.....

I have been hounded repeatedly to 'confirm' my email address only to be told that my email addresses were no longer valid because they changed email services?

All of my sites have an administration email address, ie, they ALL start with 'admin@'

I just tried to login at shrinkthebrain and was met with a message that I have been BANNED because i did not confirm my email address. I did it several times

I can't go through and change all my email addresses to meet the needs of these nincompoops and I certainly don't want to add a dozen more to my already growing list of almost impossible to manage email accounts? What the hell are these people thinking?!!!

ConstantContact. that's the name of the service this person changed to. Does anyone want to know why they will not accept a role playing name in an email address at ConstantContact?

Because it has been shown to have a low response to spam emails being sent to it!??!

I get so tired of this damn crap that we have to deal with every day! Now, a service that is directly linked to Dolphin is setting us up to spammed by one of the largest email 'marketing' companies on the planet!

If you want to know where all this email is coming from lately, might I make a suggestion that ShrinkForWeb is the leak providing all our email addresses to nefarious outside lists? Anything for a buck, that's the current corporate mantra in this world today.

Role names are names like 'Admin@'  of which I use on all my sites.

Is there another image shrinking site on the net that we can use instead of shrinkfornothing?

i modded the app to remove shrink the web and then just upload my own screen shot  from the website i am listing

The concept he has is pretty good but I agree with you. I think the idea would be better served from the back-end. It would be better to go to the website, grab an image, create a thumbnail and post it directly to the sites mod. It would be fairly quick, you'd have more control over it and you would NOT have to expose your email address to an email marketing giant like ConstantContact.

Someone here could make a good selling mod if they figured out a way to build the entire thing into an app within Dolphin. Paying for an outside service to do this seems self defeating.

Here we go, check this out for a free resource.

http://www.artviper.net/website-tools/website-thumbnails.php

There's also free ones you can incorporate right into the site. ShrinkTheWeb is a bad choice all around. it was first onb the list, that;s why they grabbed it

ctrl + print screen works wonders for me :)   ...

So ... create a mod that does that automatically from within Dolphin......

Sorry no time.  someone has me spending all my free time on some wacked out website....  :)

 : -)

LOL! Oh yeah, I know that guy.... tends to get carried away with projects...

Bill,

You have so much to learn and you are embarrassing yourself to anyone who knows of ConstantContact (does not spam) OR ShrinkTheWeb (leader in the industry). Just do a little research before you vent or especially before you slander (yes, we saw your bogus review), because it might land you in trouble one day. I'm just trying to help YOU out.

I think it's a bit ironic that you won't abide by widely accepted email "best practices" because it's "too time consuming," but you're down to ask others to go through a TON of trouble to integrate another provider. Good luck with your ArtViper integration. :)

Cheers.

Excuse me? ShrinkTheWeb is only a leader because of tactics designed to get placement on the web.

Email advertising campaigns which might follow some technical rule that makes them legal by being "opt-out" are still spam in my opinion. This is the true business of ConstantContact, (your new email provider). You only need to look at how much time each person on the planet spends sorting through all this bullshit email to understand. To be fair, your service is NOT doing this yet but we can expect it in the future because of who you are in bed with. Just because they are big and are approved by Microsoft does not make them any better than the guy running spam campaigns from his basement cellar under the cover of internet darkness!

Email address farming campaigns are done by EVERY email solicitor, legal or otherwise and I for one, do NOT support the process or the companies that bed them in any manner whatsoever. Even though you may not think they are, ConstantContact has to get their email addresses from somewhere.

The review is honest and to the point. The ONLY reason an email company like ConstantContact does not allow 'admin@' is NOT because of possible increased spam but because the address had a very LOW return rate on non consent emails sent to it. This information is by THEIR OWN ADMISSION as the result of a phone call I made directly to the company after dealing with you the other day. I pretended to be an email customer using their services and got this information first hand. They weren't shy about telling me at all and OFFERED it to me. I was, to say the least, a little shocked it was so easy to get.

There is another reason you are a leader. It's because people have not taken the time (yet) to figure out this particular service is best performed locally from within their own website or server setup. It's really not that hard to go to a site and cap an image of it.  Others on the internet have also decided this and decided it's NOT a path that will present any real returns over time and as a result, you aren't faced with any real competition for it.You are dying a slow death. You just don't know it yet.

 I am sure most of the people here have also dealt with your incessant emails telling them this is broke or that isn't working or that they MUST change their email addresses so you can meet the needs of your spamming counterpart. They probably also have their own ideas as well about your claimed NO #1" status. I am also sure they have also dealt with the 5 minute return on a thumb request trying to get their site mods working in the past and the many who have just given up on it ever really functioning well enough to be in a production environment. If you would like, I can also post your email to me where you are blaming Dolphin and Boonex for the failure of your site to produce reliable and quick thumb images for their product in a reasonable amount of time.

BTW, I am just a greasy tow truck driver who steals cars for a living. Many judge me by that fact and I am used to it. In fact, I revel in it because they think me stupid or of little intelligence and it gives me the power to set you up here for a major fall by trying to come up against me one on one.

How dare you come in here amongst my friends and threaten me. It is you that have made yourself look bad....

According to the following article, Wordpress has a service called "mshot" that seems to do the same thing.

http://markwilkinson.me/2011/09/how-to-use-the-wordpress-mshots-with-wordpress/

I haven't tested it though so I don't know if it will actually work but thought it was worth a try. So let me know if it does!!!

I believe this is the url for the mshots developer site:

http://www.wpforchurch.com/plugins/mshots/

You could maybe try and convince them to build a module for Dolphin or find a way to get it to work with Dolphin 

@bengunn

I doubt that mshots will give you the speed on new captures that you're looking for --as it's an unsupported service. However, that may have changed since I tested it out last year.

Some of the other services that are still actively supported (for now) are:

http://www.snap.com - does not allow direct linking

http://www.thumbshots.com

http://www.websnapr.com

http://www.thumbalizr.com - does go down a bit, though

PageGlimpse was good but went out of business earlier this year. Snapcasa was also decent but went out of business early last year. All the others are too small time, under-funded, or under-supported to be considered. If you want to try another service, the ones I listed are probably your best bets. ;)

Cheers.

Just stumbled over this post by checking my stats. @  Puravida: Just because we do not market our website snapshot tool ( www.artviper.net ) like the others do doesn't mean that it's not good - the opposite is reality. We're the only ones with no waiting queue, serving more than 20 GB of image data each day - since over 5 years, with success.

We have two different types, the free one, just for all you guys out there who need a reliable snapshot system for free ( without  bandwidth limitations or X snaps per day ) and a premium one with some enhancements like bigger screen sizes, cropped elements, header status info, so you can use it in any automated backend and alike. Show me one of the other providers that serves that kind of stuff?

You can see our script in action on w3csites.com for example, this guy is running our script ever since.

Oh and by the way, you won't get a single email from us except we are announcing an update or a timeout to clean up the system ( which by the way happens maybe 2-3 times a year ).

in all this and my unity brothers, you know what i am talking about here. 

a service that is free, is never really free, its free to access, to login to, to create an account, but free its not. if you sign up and fail to read the TOS, thats your monkey ass. 

consider our unity brother smoge, who ran up on the house, declaring free RMS

oh that rocks brother smoge, but free is not free is it brother smoge. 

unity, service is a service, read the TOS please

 @artViper: I don't know how your service fares these days. I was really making a comment in general response to integrating another service. Perhaps yours works well. Past comments from users that have switched made it seem like you guys were trying to sell off the service a couple of years back, so that was our impression. With all of the screenshot providers going out of business once they became popular and unable to keep up,we just grouped you in with them. The comment wasn't meant as a "bash" of your service. ;)

We're the only ones with no waiting queue

This is only possible at low capture volumes. Once you reach the volumes that we process monthly, even hundreds of concurrent capture generators is not enough to keep a queue-less operation. The only true way to have no queue is to pre-capture the entire Internet's web pages. Perhaps one day...

We have two different types, the free one, just for all you guys out there who need a reliable snapshot system for free ( without  bandwidth limitations or X snaps per day ) and a premium one with some enhancements like bigger screen sizes, cropped elements, header status info, so you can use it in any automated backend and alike. Show me one of the other providers that serves that kind of stuff?

Well, ShrinkTheWeb provides all of that, but I hear you. None of the other competitors (except for Thumbalizr and Websnapr) offers any of the premium services, and even then it's a limited selection.

Congratulations on your continued success of 5 years. That's no small feat. ;)

For those that do not want to use shrink the web any longer for the sites modules.  I have included two versions of it.

V1. removed shrink the web so you can include your own thumb and link.

V2. removed shrink the web and thumb option so you have just a text based list of sites.