As an offshoot from a previous project, Joshua Eichorn has extended his code and created Webthumb, an automatic way to create thumbnails of any website out there.

So about 11 months (wow that long time ago, feels like last month) I used some code I had lying around to make some thumbnails of all the planet php blogs. Work priorities has finally allowed me to work on that code base again, and I was able to get things up to a usable state.

The result of this, is a new project. A website that lets you grab snapshots of any website at any time. The result is 3 different images, one at 800×600, one at 160×120 and one at 80×60.

He includes an example shot of his website to give you an idea of the results. You can also go to the project's page and enter in a URL of your choice to test it out. He also tries to answer a few questions about the script such as "How does it work?" and "Is there a webservice API?".