HTML URL as a preview instead of text link

Question

So basically what i'm trying to achieve is when i put a link in a specific place, i want it to not show up as a text link but show up as a preview of the website (much like how chrome or firefox does it in the homepage)

I have tried with iframes but some sites do not get rendered in them. Any idea how this could be done?

Answer 1

You can achieve this using web capture service (virtual client that visits website and takes a screenshot and saves it as thumbnail, also parse the website metadata).

Your "special place" should parse the content and send the link to "your capture service" (there are some php/c#/java libraries) or a public web capture service.

Good luck,

example of public api:

http://api.thumbalizr.com/?url=https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41281928/html-url-as-a-preview-instead-of-text-link&width=160