For those of you who don't know, I am the owner and occassional operator (!) of CSS {Imagine}, a simple, but relatively well-visited web design gallery.  One of the requirements I had for this site when I built it was that I did NOT want to have to do any work of manually grabbing screenshots and cropping thumbnails for the sites that are submitted to the site.  So using a combination of a third-party screen-capture service and CF8's super-awesome image editing tools, I've built an entirely automated process for handling of all this less-than-fun work.  Heck, all I have to do to kick off the process is to click a link in a notification e-mail…:)

One of the downsides to using the third-party service is that the results are VERY inconsistent.  Some of the images are garbled, while others simply fail.  However, the biggest issue I have is that the service has–reasonably enough–a finite amount of servers to process all the request.  Therefore, there are several occassions (daily) that I have to wait to kick off the process until the screen shot service has reached my requests in the queue.  I know, I know, not a huge deal.  However, it would More >