Facebook has this cool functionality: when you post something that seems to be a link, it will automaticly parse the linked site and show you

  • The content of the title-tag
  • A Teaser of the Text (I don't know how it is able to identify the content area, but it seems to be very reliable)
  • An Image taken from the site (it present you every img-tag and you can choose witch you want to show)

For example when I enter this site:
http://drupal.org/node/854298

The title will look like this:

Case Study: www.aidshilfe.de relaunch | drupal.org

This image will be proposed as decoration:
http://drupal.org/files/addr_small.jpg

And this text will be fetched as teaser:

The Deutsche Aids-Hilfe (DAH) is the leading German non-governmental organization that deals with the concerns of people living with HIV/AIDS and helps raise awareness of effective HIV prevention techniques. As the governing body for more than 120 local AIDS service organizations, it supports this work at many different levels.

I think this is a very cool feature that allows you to show an external link just like an internal node reference. Should this rather be a separate module?

Comments

Scott J’s picture

Scott J commented

This is a great idea.

I've been doing this by just copying and pasting into fields manually, or using Embedded Image Field but I just found Websnapr Field which works with this module. I'm going to play with it to see what it can do.

Scott J’s picture

Scott J commented

OK Loominade, it looks like Websnapr gives a preview of the entire web page, not just a single image.
But I did find Facebook-style Micropublisher module. It does exactly what you want.

jkingsnorth’s picture

jkingsnorth commented
Issue summary: View changes

Marked #771224: Link Scraping as duplicate of this issue.

jcfiala’s picture

jcfiala commented

I really think this is something that's outside of what the basic link module wants to do, which is to keep track of links.

That being said, it sounds like a grand idea for a new module which presents a new format via hook_field_formatter_info and some additional work with hook_field_formatter_view. The basic work isn't that complex to create a formatter, and maybe you can borrow code from the Facebook-style Micropublisher module that Scott J posted above.

I'm not going to close this issue, because I'm curious to see what comes of the discussion, but I'm not likely to spin up any new code on my own for it.

jkingsnorth’s picture

jkingsnorth commented

There is a module which seems to supply the thumbnail part of this request: https://drupal.org/project/shrinktheweb

And an issue about integration with this module here: #1121680: ShrinkTheWeb integration

jcfiala’s picture

jcfiala commented

Good catch, .John.

I think in the near future I'm going to dip into the module description and add a link to ShrinkTheWeb, since they're going to handle this 'for' us. And then I'll close this ticket. (I don't want to close it now, because I want to remind myself to add the link.)

jcfiala’s picture

jcfiala commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Okay, I've added a link to the ShrinkTheWeb module on the link front page, so I can close this.