Browse.ie - Site Thumbnails
Weekends are the best time of the week for me to "mess about" with sites.
I've spent several hours this weekend tweaking both search.ie and browse.ie
One of the minor additions I've made on Browse.ie is the inclusion of screenshot thumbnails for some of the sites. It's not arbitrary, as I'm using a 3rd party provider. If they have a screengrab of the site it will appear automatically in the form of a 120 x 90 image.
You can see some examples here
As you can see it's still suffering from some teething problems, which I'll hopefully be able to sort out.. if I can't I'll simply remove the tags from the templates.
What do people think of the idea?
Is it good, bad or are you completely indifferent?
| 
Site thumbnail feature is very nice. They are also surprising fast to load, even on dialup.
Nice job,
Niall - Glad you like them :)
Do you think a similar feature on search.ie would be a good idea?
I don't see why not. The only problem I can foresee is that search.ie has a lot more sites, and depending on many are displayed at time could have more of an impact on the time it takes a page to load.
It's actually the other way round :)
browse.ie has a lot more sites than search.ie
Just from a cursory glance at the main page of both search.ie and browse.ie, it seems that search .ie has way more sites than browse.ie! Society and Culture might be tipping it in flavour of browse.ie though :)
Niall
Thanks for the feeback. I'll be looking at the layout of both sites over the next while so I may rejig things a bit on browse.ie ....