This week, as a useful add-on to our website, we added the “Snap Preview Anywhere” service.

This adds a tiny icon next to each external link (see the websites in the right-hand navigation — notice the new small icon that looks like this: ?

As shown below, when you hover your mouse over this icon, it brings up a small window with a preview of that external web page. The preview isn’t always current, but if the website design is consistent, it’ll be pretty accurate even if not the most up-to-date snapshot of the page in question.

I find this useful when doing research — as I often do lots of searches at once and knowing what the page looks like in advance often highlights pages that I’ve already seen, but forgotten the address of — this way, I get a visual hint/clue before I click the link, which triggers my memory much more than the words do.

Of course, there are options on this little pop-up window to turn off this feature. We deliberately set our settings so that only the tiny icon pops up the preview window, and not the regular link — that may become annoying, as it is easy to trigger by accident, not just by choice.

Also, if Snap Preview Anywhere doesn’t have that external website already with a mini-screenshot in its database, then it will “queue” it up for later and let you know. That way, you’re not waiting or slowed down because a site isn’t yet part of the preview database.

If you want to know more about putting it on your own website, just hover over one of the live external link icons, and follow the link to the Snap website. It’s all free, so there’s no cost or credit cards involved — I’m not an affiliate for Snap and don’t earn income this way.

As you can see in the image above, you even get a small (20×100 pixel) image to help “brand” the pop-up with your own image, and you can choose from a handful of different colour options to suit your site’s design.

In terms of useful snapshot previews, I also have the very useful add-on for Firefox called GooglePreview. This inserts website previews in both Google and Yahoo! search results. With a broadband link, the extra “overhead” of having this turned on is not noticeable, and again, it’s a good trigger.

Firefox of course is the free, open source web browser that competes with Internet Explorer and is constantly expanding its installed user base. We love it enough to put a link to Firefox (with the handy Google toolbar) in the footer of every page on this website. And in the spirit of openness, as Google hands out revenue for anyone who downloads from that link, hey, if you click on it, then we earn a tiny credit in our AdSense account.

Two more internet services/features that make life on-line easier!