Introduction

This Getting Started Guide walks you through the steps to add thumbnail images of websites to your web pages. This guide covers examples in the following programming languages:

JSP/Java
ASPX/C#
Perl
PHP

The tutorial does not include the following information:

Reference information for the web service API
Description of all the features included in the web service

About the Thumbnails

Thumbnail images exist for the home pages of millions of web sites. The images come in two sizes:

Size	Sample Image
Small 111x82 pixels ~3kb in size
Large 201x147 pixels ~8kb in size

The simplest way to add thumbnail images to a web page is to use the functions from one of the ThumbnailUtility packages included with this guide. To add thumbnail images to a web page you simply call the get_thumbnail_link function and pass in the url of the website you want a thumbnail for, and then print out the returned HTML snippet to your web page. The next sections describe the details.

Note: The ThumbnailUtility functions make requests to the AlexaSiteThumbnail web service for you. Advanced users can also access the web services API directly. See here for details.

Language Filtering

Because this guide covers multiple programming languages, you may want to just read the steps for one particular language. The pages in this guide that feature examples allow you to filter the page contents for a particular language. To do this, select the language using the Show Language list on the top-right corner of the page.

Selecting a language filter option applies to all of the pages in this guide.

Next Step: Prerequisites