Prerequisites

Here's what you need to get started.

Signing Up

You must have signed up for the service with a valid credit card before you can retrieve thumbnail images from the Alexa Site Thumbnail web service.

Item	Description	Sign Up At
Amazon Web Services account	Provides you with access identifiers for authenticating requests and account management information for all of Amazon's web services. Once you have an Amazon Web Services account, you can retrieve your access identifiers at any time by going to the AWS web site, pointing to the Your Web Services Account button (on the top right side of the page), then clicking View Access Key Identifiers.	http://aws.amazon.com
Alexa Site Thumbnail Subscription	You must also sign up for the AlexaSiteThumbnail web service.	http://aws.amazon.com/ast

Item

Description

Amazon Web Services account

Provides you with access identifiers for authenticating requests and account management information for all of Amazon's web services.

Once you have an Amazon Web Services account, you can retrieve your access identifiers at any time by going to the AWS web site, pointing to the Your Web Services Account button (on the top right side of the page), then clicking View Access Key Identifiers.

http://aws.amazon.com

Alexa Site Thumbnail Subscription

You must also sign up for the AlexaSiteThumbnail web service.

http://aws.amazon.com/ast

Languages and Tools Used

This guide assumes that you are running a web site driven by one of the programming languages below. If not you need to download and install the toolkits and technologies for the language of your choice before proceeding. (Click on the tool or technology name above to go to its web site for more information.)

Language	Tools Used
Java	Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 Development Kit (JDK 5.0) or equivalent Apache Tomcat or equivalent JSP engine HttpClient 3.0 or higher
C#	Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 C# Express Edition .NET Framework2.0
Perl	The Perl example uses the following modules, which can be downloaded from the CPAN web site: Digest::HMAC_SHA1 MIME::Base64 LWP XML::XPath Date::Format
PHP	PHP 5: http://www.php.net/downloads.php PHP must be installed with libcurl: http://php.net/curl

Download and Install the Sample Code and ThumbnailUtility Packages

You can get the sample code and ThumbnailUtility packages by language here:

The sample code and packages are also included in the downloadable zip file.

Download and uncompress the Getting Started Guide zip file into a working directory
Locate the subdirectory for your language of choice to view the sample files and ThumbnailUtility packages.

Next Step: Displaying a thumbnail image on a web page