Playing with Snap Shots
I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that claims that it enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts, makes the tea, bakes some biscuits and more.
How it works is that if you hover over a live link to another webpage then the spapshot tool will show you a snapshot of that page – thereby giving some extra information to help you to decide if you wish to visit the page or not.
This is a free tool – which is to say that i don’t pay to use to use it however it does generate income for the snap boys and girls by showing ads on the the snapshot box which opens up. They do promise to not advertise gambling and suchlike and although I am not a big fan of advertising I thought that I would give it a go. I have noticed that if you are browsing in Mozilla with the ad-blocker extension then you don’t see the ads – nice one Firefox!
On some websites and blogs that are using this tool you may see little icons (like a cartoon thought bubble) that alert you the fact that there is an active snapshot link there. I have chosen for the moment to disable this as personally I found it a little cluttered – who knows – I may well change my mind and switch it on – time will tell.
Some of you who are regular readers will know that I really like to play with colourful text in my blog posts/articles. I am aware that this can make it confusing when there are live links also in the article so I will endeavour to always underline the live links and thereby provide a little consistency in my otherwise slightly mad world 🙂
Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave this site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.
Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out. I would also really appreciate it if you would let me know what you think of the tool – is it really annoying? Is it hard to find? Do you enjoy it?
Please leave me a comment to help me learn more about creating an enjoyable blog for you – the reader…
