HN Explorer

29 comments

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saurabh
Can this be ported to Windows?

EDIT: took a look at the source, it uses OS X specific API's.

swirlee
wkhtmltopdf renders web pages to PDF using WebKit and works great on Windows, for what it's worth. It's just one more step to go from PDF to PNG. The results were great when I used it, but I'm not sure how it deals with e.g. Flash.

http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

saurabh
thanks, i checked it out, i wish it could output png though.
3ds
either use aviary.com or:

all you need is imagemagick

wkhtmltopdf www.google.com google.pdf && convert google.pdf google.png

results aren't nearly as good as the browser addon but it works

waleedka
Can someone recommend a similar tool that runs on Linux and can render flash?
ChuckN
python-webkit2png mentioned above does and it runs on xvfb which is extremely handy.
paraschopra
I have used it on server and it works flawlessly. But you will need Xvfb on server and X11-fonts installed to make it work.
anathema
If anyone's interested, I ported this into a Ruby Gem a couple of years back. I haven't given it too much love lately, but it should still be good/useful: http://github.com/jurisgalang/snapurl
sailormoon
This is probably the wrong forum but there is a mistake in the regex in the makeFilename method. In trying to detect https it will strip the first letter of any domain starting with s. Check it out:

  >> name = 'http://super.com/'
  => "http://super.com/"
  >> name.gsub!(/\W/, '')
  => "httpsupercom"
  >> name.gsub!(/^http(s)?/i, '')
  => "upercom"
Cool, though ; )
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
xal
I build a web service for this in my spare time: http://www.web2png.com . You can set up profiles where you select the resulting resolution of the screenshot and apply all sorts of effects like polaroid frame, drop shadows and stuff like this. Once created you get a special URL through which you can get screenshots of web sites using your specifications.

Do you think this may be worth $19 a month? I provide a jquery plugin which makes this all really easy..

tptacek
Who would it be worth a monthly fee to? Answer that question first.
aphyr
We use a modified webkit2png, along with some ruby and erlang RPC stuff, to take thumbnails of flash videos at vodpod.com. It works great!
deno
Wouldn’t something like getting the actual video file (flv or h.264) be a simpler approach? I mean don’t you have to have some kind of sandboxing etc. since you are executing unknown code (swf)?
aphyr
Oh, believe me, I'd love to. The difficulty, however, is that extracting H264 or FLV streams from embed codes is a process that every video host is actively attempting to thwart--and there's some 15,000 of them, and one of me. :)