So I’ve had this chain of dev ideas. Hopefully I’ll get back to showing off the ancestor here eventually, but this one’s fun & ready enough to share now.
Basically, I like Windows XP Explorer’s “slideshow” view for images. It’s a great interface. By various (non-intentional) routes, I ended up making a web-based equivalent to that interface — except not for images, it’s for entire websites.
It’s probably better demonstrated than explained. Take a look here (in IE!): http://throbs.net/web/utils/siteGallery/?
Yes, it’s IE-only. Fortunately this is not production code, just an experiment. If the other browsers had an equivalent to CSS Visual Filters (in this case the zoom filter, used to create the live thumbnails), I’d’ve been there in a heartbeat (heartthrob?), but alas, no such luck…
The fun part is the querystring: just put your own site URLs at the end (separated by commas) and you’ve got your own gallery, fully bookmarkable.
The magic is all done in browser javascript, so my server is quite unaware of what sites are being loaded (go ahead & view source). If there’s interest, I’ll zip it up for easy download.
I’m sure there are limitations to the total number of sites it could handle. The first is probably how much your machine’s RAM (since it loads each site in its own IFRAME). The next would be IE’s querystring length (1024 characters?). Regardless, my original intent was only to keep easy tabs on a few internal “dashboard” sites, and while it technically is some sort of aggregator, I certainly would not use it to read 1000 blogs!
Toy around with it. I’d love to hear what you think.