Display content from other websites…snapmylink.

Not too long back, there was a requirement of displaying external content in a blog directory. A temporary arrangement was made to make use of an iframe. After all it did provide a conclusive solution as per the requirement of the blog directory, snapmylink. And finally the hunt for the elegant and permanent solution is over. Though iframe was good enough, it had issues like messing up the search engine crawlers. But more that pros and cons of iframe what the alternative provided was a stable and lasting solution without any hangups.

A website screen shot service is offered commercially by many providers. Most of them, have some sort of restrictions on unlimited usage. What most are not aware that wordpress.com has its own inbuilt feature to take screenshots of any website/webpage and display them. This feature is called mShots. Making use of this feature, Kevin Leary and binarymoon have created a simple wordpress plugin called Browser Shots. After installation, it offers two ways to insert screenshots of any website. One, by inserting the shortcode and other by placing an icon on the tinyMCE editor itself to make the whole process even simpler.

An example of shortcode for Browser Shots is as below

[browser-shot url=”http://prepforum.wordpress.com/” width=”600″]

The result is as displayed in this URL

http://snapmylink.com/prepforum-wordpress-com/

Screenshots are refreshed, though we have to still arrive at the actual refresh rate. The first one takes some time to appear. But the next ones are almost instantaneous.