Anyway, in order to get to your farm, you must wait a few seconds for the application to load. But the application is in flash and there is no flash visible yet. So what exactly is it loading?

Well… nothing exactly. It’s just waiting for the ad to display for 5 seconds so then we can move on to the actual preloader included in the SWF. Here’s the exact Javascript from the page:

function InitGame() {
try {
startGame();
} catch (err) {
}
}
var timer = 5;
var adControlled = false;
function atrDefaultInitGame() {
adControlled = true;
ShowTime();
}
function atrGetControl() {
adControlled = true;
}
function checkInitGameUnderControl() {
if (!adControlled) {
showPlayNowMessage();
}
}
// test if after 5 seconds no ad has explicitly made
 responsible of showing the init game link
// also, in case after 10 secs the ad hasn't finished,
 show the init game link
setTimeout(checkInitGameUnderControl, 5 * 1000);
setTimeout(showPlayNowMessage, 10 * 1000);
...

Yup, do check those comments right there.

After some unsuccessful searching for a website thumbnail service I found SnapCasa. The free version lets you use 100000 thumb requests per month without watermarks. If you combine this with some server side script to cache and serve the image directly from your server you have nothing to worry about. Another thing I needed was the ability to get screenshots of inner pages (other services such as Girafa‘s free version only allow captures of homepages). SnapCasa has that too.

The website looks and feels pretty new and sloppy. Although some account pages have “Untitled Document” as the title and other sections lack content, it does the job.

Oh, and support is quite responsive. Didn’t take any time to receive a reply.

Here are some comparisons (only found them after setting up snapcasa):

• http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2007-08/23-free_website_thumbnail_services
• http://designerside.com/article/8-website-thumbnail-generation-services-compared

URL – http://www.howtocleanstuff.net