Joshua Eichorn, the author of “Understanding AJAX” and a renowned php developer recently released WebThumb, a site to create thumbnails of web pages. The whole system is developed in c and it uses Mozilla engine to render the webpage into images. Shortly after publishing WebThumb, he released a set of API so that developers can create thumbnails from their applications. This API is very simple to use. In this Article we are going to discuss how we can incorporate WebThumb API in PHP to create thumbnail of web pages from our PHP applications.

Using WebThumb API, you can generate a thumbnail in three steps. First you have to place a request containing the URL. As soon as your request is successful, WebThumb store your request in queue. That means you are not getting the thumbnail instantly (well, there are other factors also. to fetch an url requires time, so it is not possible to generate the thumbnail in real time) – In second step you have to check whether your thumbnail has been generated or it is still in the queue. If you get a green signal, you will proceed to the third step where you have to request a download URL of your thumbnails. Before jumping into the code, let’s take a look to the API format.

Step 1: Place a request
To request thumbnail for an URL, you should post an XML message to the WebThumb server in the following format

<webthumb>
	<apikey>apikey here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
	</request>
</webthumb>

You may wonder at this stage that we didn’t discus about the apikey yet. So what is this and where from you can obtain your key? (more…)

In our first part we just discussed what is a blogging API and how we can utilize them. In this post I am going to show how to fetch available categories in a blog and how to retrieve a specific post.

To retrieve available categories you have to use metaWeblog.getCategories as shown below

<?php
	include("xmlrpc.inc.php");

	$c = new xmlrpc_client("/xmlrpc.php", "hasin.wordpress.com", 80);
	$c->return_type = 'phpvals'; // let client give us back php values instead of xmlrpcvals

	echo "<pre>";

	$x = new xmlrpcmsg("metaWeblog.getCategories",array(php_xmlrpc_encode("1"),
	                                     php_xmlrpc_encode("someusername"),
	                                     php_xmlrpc_encode("somepassword")));


	$r =$c->send($x);
    if ($r->errno=="0")
	print_r($r);
?>

And To retrieve a specific post you have to metaWeblog.getPost API as shown here

<?php
	include("xmlrpc.inc.php");

	$c = new xmlrpc_client("/xmlrpc.php", "hasin.wordpress.com", 80);
	$c->return_type = 'phpvals'; // let client give us back php values instead of xmlrpcvals

	echo "<pre>";

	$x = new xmlrpcmsg("metaWeblog.getPost",array(php_xmlrpc_encode("1"), //postId
	                                     php_xmlrpc_encode("someusername"),
	                                     php_xmlrpc_encode("somepassword")));


	$r =$c->send($x);
    if ($r->errno=="0")
	print_r($r);
?>