You all know by now that Snap has launched a new product range called Snap Anywhere™ including two unique products for Bloggers and Site Owners, Snap Search Anywhere™ a branded search box you can place in a variety of places on a site and Snap Preview Anywhere™ a snippet of jscript code that sits in the <HEAD> of your HTML page and triggers a nice little floating window with an image preview of any website being linked to.
You can read more about it here at the Snap Anywhere™ Landing Page.
The Basics of Snap Preview Anywhere™
I am focusing specifically on the Snap Preview Anywhere™ product, as it has some neat aspects that are not obvious to novice users upon first implementation and usage.
First off its pretty easy to use, in the sign up form, you just paste in your sites URL, a valid email address for registration (we may send you updates on the service when it is revised) and the CAPTCHA code as displayed (for security against pesky bots!).
Next you are delivered a page with the code snippet. At this point you can choose to use it with or without the Snap Branded Search box, but, if you remove the search box then you loose out on monetary reward opportunities that we may provide for users in the future!
Once you have pasted the Snap Preview Anywhere™ code snippet just before the </HEAD> tag (it needs to be just before the closing head tag), then you can save your page or template changes and reload your site.
Note: In some cases we have noticed caches need to be cleared previous to the code working properly, so please do a hard refresh (or SHIFT-Reload) in your browser of choice.
Customization of Snap Preview Anywhere™ Experience
Once you get used to the mousing and hover functionality, there are a couple of neat tricks you can do with the product if your comfortable editing your blog template in more depth.
Deactivation for Internal Links
The Snap Preview Anywhere™ product supports some additional jscript that can be added to a page to sniff out which links are internal and external and flag the internal ones to NOT exhibit the dynamic display window behavior. This can help if you have a lot of internal links or you dont want your Blogs top level page navigation and archive links to trigger this functionality.
Just paste this snippet of jscript code below right before the </BODY> tag (it needs to be just before the closing body tag) in order to flag internal links to NOT trigger Snap Preview Anywhere™ .
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
//change sites internal links to class "snap_nopreview"
var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for (var l = 0; l < links.length; l++) {
if(links[l].href.match(/^http:\/\/www\.example\.com/)){
links[l].className += " snap_nopreview";
}
}
//]]>
</script>
Programmers Note: Remember to change the 'www.example.com' URL above to your own site or blog URL.
Help Speed Up the Capture of Site Previews
You can assist in the speed at which site previews are captured for your own site or blog by manually hovering over each of the most obvious links on your site that you know for sure we would not have a preview for. Once you see the 'Capturing' message appear you can then mouse over to the next link and so on... The action of hovering and then triggering the capture process adds the site to our image que automatically and within a few seconds will complete capture of the site image preview. As user adoption increases and our site image library grows, the need to do this will decrease of course.
Look out for more information and tips on use of Snap Preview Anywhere™ in the near future!
More information can be read in our official Snap Preview Anywhere™ FAQ. Let us know what you think! We are open to your thoughts, suggestions for improvement or just general compliments!
This is a very good tool - for both Blogs and Websites -
If this is heavily promoted it will surely bring an entire new audience to SNAP
Would be interesting to interview the creator of this tool :-)
See it in action at Dexly.com. Snap Preview Anywhere is awsome. Dexly is designed heavily with AJAX, Snap Preview Anywhere has no problem. Our user loves it.
Go Snap…
John
Founder/CEO Dexly.com
Hi, mi name is Jim, I developed one plugin for add Snap Preview into WordPress. This plugin WP-SnapPreview can be download in:
http://blog.unijimpe.net/wp-snappreview/
Thanks.
This is definitely an effective tool for saving time and effort. Imagine searching through the Internet and the last thing you want is tripping on a sales letter marketing products after products. I appreciate it a lot.
Keep charging forward,
Seth
Internet Marketing