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I was calculating, if I'd do link directory, how much income would be possible, and how much would cost to get thumbnails for the website. Unfortunately the result was, that I could not afford so high prices you use. It's not your fault, just the internet business nowadays doesn't pays so well to afford such high, monthly recurring costs.
We posted prices, I think they are still posted on
http://UltraNerds.com for us to do it for you. We did restrict, at that time, to directories under 10,000 links, for the problems mentioned above.
But, as time has moved on, we are willing to expand the services, *and* we can create the thumbnails for you in any size you want, and with or without a black border. (I think
http://origami.net or
http://pugs.net have them mixed up in the directory).
We can also restrict it to only links that do not show an image from the OTP/Thumbshots project.
We need access to your site, though, since we run some scripts that check images, *AND* we store _all_ the images on your site, in a cache, so you need the disk space.
At the expense of diskspace, we've found performance is _significantly_ better than relying on outside servers.
We also can tune a set up to your needs.
For a *lot* of reasons, we like to consider the image cache to be a real part of your directory, not an add on. You have links that are not in the DMOZ database, and those images will not be served by the OTP server.
Also, and this is where the NexusLinks comes in, we will add your links to our database, and update the images regularly. You'll be able to "fetch" updated copies of the images using a plugin. This has not been developed yet, but it's been planned, and has two different development concepts. Each has benefits, and both may be implemented.
The reason for this is two-fold. Image generation software can kick the #*%Q out of a server, and it consumes huge amounts of memory, and resources, that have nothing to do with web serving. Moving the image generation programs off, to other servers makes a huge amount of sense. The other reason is that most directories are most concerned with acquiring new links, content, and data, and the screen shots are not really something most webmasters want to have to worry about. If you add a link, and the thumbnail is missing, the program should automatically check our database, if it's there, it fetches it, if not, it queues the request, and the image is generated. The program will cache a blank image, that expires in 24-hours, and will attempt a re-fetch. This keeps requests to our servers down, and hopefully within 24-48 hours the new thumbnail will be ready for you.
Additionally, check the next post for more information on the Nexus Links project.
PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc. The best way to contact me is to
NOT use Email.
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