I've been hanging out on the #epicode IRC channel for the past few months, and over time I've played with several IRC clients such as XChat, Mibbit (for the Web) and HydraIRC. One of the things that you do most often on IRC is /msg people. The server that I use for #epicode is FreeNode. This server requires you to register you nick before doing a /msg. If you try to /msg without registering, you get an error message back from the server. XChat, annoyingly, didn't show me the IRC error and I spent quite some time trying to figure out what was wrong. Mibbit behaves nicely, but you have to enter your credentials every time which is a pain. (tip: on Mibbit,  click the 'Auth' link next to the server dropdown on the main page and you can enter your NickServ password straight in there!) HydraIRC behaves nicely too, but I've been having problems getting it to store my NickServ password so I don't have to enter it every time.

In theory, the password is saved by HydraIRC when you create a favourite, but it doesn't seem to work for channel favourites, only server favourites. No, I've no idea why. If you look in the XML profile file in the HydraIRC installation directory all the information looks correct. Maybe they work for you but they sure are a pain for me. Thankfully, there is an easy workaround. HydraIRC has a bit of a hack called Command Profiles. I wouldn't describe them as a well-documented feature but they do the trick. Essentially a command profile is just a set of IRC commands that can be run automatically when you connect to a particular IRC server. You can find the command profiles by going Options -> Prefs... -> Command Profiles. In there, you create a profile using a special name so that is picked up on logging in to a server. The name, in my case, is FreeNode_OnLoggedIn. Within that I simply put in my NickServ identification.

When I go to my #epicode channel favourite now, it automatically runs my identification with NickServ so that I can /msg people without the pesky error message and having to register myself manually with NickServ every time!

At the EPiServer Partner Summit I was chatting over dinner to Andy Brodie of Networked Planet. He was remarking that it would be nice within EPiServer to have the capability to show site thumbnails when you hovered over hyperlinks. This intrigued me so when I got back to the UK I did some investigation. There are sites on the internet that do provide a service for this, such as websnapr, but ideally I wanted something that I had full control over.

Time to start coding :)

After some investigation on the web I found a great article about the WebBrowser control and ASP.NET. I tailored it to my needs and got a little thumbnail generator working. I also built a set of JavaScript functions that would show the thumbnails on hyperlinks using DHTML. Next I built a Control Adapter that would pick up EPiServer properties and parse them for hyperlinks. If it found hyperlinks it would insert references to my JavaScript functions. Lastly I wrapped all this in an assembly complete with my Single-Assembly VPP method and using dynamic web resource references.

And so HyperThumbnail was born. Go check it out on EPiCode or see the sample on B&D EPiLabs (hover over the hyperlinks in the content). Deploying to your own site couldn't be easier - simply drag-and-drop the DLL and a .browser file into your website folders.